The story of the battle to save Mount St Mary’s Church
It was a victory for people power and a congregation who prayers were answered.
The parishioners of Mount St Mary’s Church in Richmond Hill successfully prevented the landmark from the demolition ball in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s.
It was a campaign which filled row upon row of column inches in your Yorkshire Evening Post.
Now the story of the fight is being told told in a fascinating free lecture by historian Dr Kevin Grady as part of his annual ‘Leeds in Your Lunch Hour’ lecture series organised by Leeds Civic Trust.
It is being held at Leeds Minster on Wednesday, February 26, at 1pm.
In the first half of the 19th century Richmond Hill or ‘The Bank’ on the edge of Leeds city centre became home to thousands of Irish people who had fled the famine and their poverty-stricken lives in Ireland.
In 1851 the French religious order – The Oblates of Mary Immaculate – decided to build a church to serve the working-class Irish Catholics living in great poverty and in appalling housing conditions on The Bank.
Mount St Mary’s Church, opened 1857, served the Catholic community of Leeds for over a hundred years until it closed in 1989 to the great sorrow of its congregation.
When the church was threatened with closure in the late 1980s, the parishioners of Mount St Mary’s fought a truly heroic campaign to prevent this church at the heart of their community from being closed and demolished.
Though the church was closed in 1989, with many twists and turns the campaign to save it from demolition continued for many years, but the church became derelict.
Finally, at the end of 2024 Redwing Properties Ltd obtained planning permission for a highly imaginative scheme which will conserve a substantial part of the church for the future.
Much needed new housing is now being built retaining and renovating the historic Pugin-designed transepts, chancel and sanctuary of the church, while the demolished nave is to be replaced by a stylish modern apartment block which recreates the shape of the nave. Construction work on the site began in late 2024.
Dr Kevin Grady said: “My lecture is both a tribute to the campaigning tenacity of the Catholic community of the Bank, and recalls a major episode in the work of Leeds Civic Trust.
“Redwing Properties Ltd and S9 Construction Ltd recently took me on a tour of the building site, and I was extremely impressed by their commitment to producing a high-quality scheme. While only half of the church will remain, it is the part designed by the great Victorian architect A W Pugin, and this will remain as a fine monument to history of the Irish-Catholic community of Richmond Hill.”