The Public Appeal to save the Collegiate Church of St. Peters

Description:A printed notice accompanies this letter entitled ‘To the Nobility, Clergy, and Other Inhabitants of Wolverhampton and the Neighbourhood’. The notice, printed in Wolverhampton in May 1837, appeals to the people of Wolverhampton to support the intended work on St. Peter's Church.

In the notice Warner and his fellow Churchwarden Mr. Thorneycroft note that the Church interior was so ‘uncomfortable’ that people had been ‘deterred from attending public worship’. They also remark on the ‘decayed state’ of the Church’s exterior, particularly at the West End of the Church which made passing by the Church ‘dangerous’.

With no other source of money, Warner and Thorneycroft appealed to the public for financial support, writing that ‘it is the duty of our fellow townsmen, to give us their utmost assistance’. During an ‘unsettled’ period when ‘the Church Rate question’ was causing much ‘agitation’, the Churchwardens appealed to the townspeople of Wolverhampton for their help.

The printed notice featured above describes in detail the repairs which Warner and Thorneycroft intended to be made to St. Peter's. These included new pews for the entire body of the Church and the construction of ‘an apparatus for warming the Church in the Winter season’.

The document reflects the importance of the Collegiate Church of St. Peter to Wolverhampton. Warner and Thorneycroft describe the Church as ‘a building in which, up to the present time, dissenters as well as churchmen have had an interest’.

The notice provides further details regarding subscriptions to the fund and describes St. Peters as a ‘magnificent Church, second to none in the county, but the Cathedral at Lichfield’. Warner and Thorneycroft appeal to the people of Wolverhampton not to allow the Church ‘to fall to ruin and decay’.