Fancy living in a £1.3m church? (From The Argus)

Fancy living in a £1.3m church?

11:29am Friday 15th February 2013 in News By Anna Roberts, Crime reporter

Fancy living in a £1.3m church?

With its high ceilings and stained glass windows, you’ll think all your Sundays have come at once if you moved in.

Now you could pontificate from your very own pulpit in this renovated 19th century church in central Brighton, which is on the market for £1.3million.

The French Reformed Church in Queensbury Mews, close to the seafront and city centre, closed as a place of worship in 2008.

The church’s congregation is believed to have been formed in about 1550 by the Flemish martyr Deryk Carver. It met at a number of locations, including the Union Street chapel, before the church opened to cater for cross-Channel tourists visiting Brighton.

It was built on a plot of land off Regency Square, bought for £735 in the 1880s with the help of the Protestant churches of France.

Building work began on the red-brick church in 1887 and it remains one of only two French Protestant churches in England. The other is in Soho Square, London.

But the congregation shrunk and Sunday services, delivered in French and English, usually attracted only a handful of people when it closed five years ago.

Now it is being sold as a two-bedroom, three-bathroom home with features including an open pulpit.

The church also has three pairs of lancet windows in the western face, a pointed-arch entrance door and rose window, a slate roof and a small copper spire on top of a square turret.

Concealed in the central foundation stone are items associated with Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. The church’s foundation stone was laid by the Mayor of Brighton using a specially made trowel, and the church was consecrated on February 27, 1888.

Winkworth, which is selling the church, said: “This is a spectacular conversion of a building with considerable history.”

For more information visit www.winkworth.co.uk