St Peter’s Chapel at Bradwell-on-Sea isn’t your usual religious building. There are no grand vistas, no stained glass, no gold leafed ceilings. It’s religion laid bare. Ancient stone, much of it taken from the walls of an older Roman fort, used to raise a chapel dedicated to St Peter at the very end of St Peter’s Way on the Essex coast.
The chapel was built in 654 AD by St Cedd, a monk who’d trained at Lindisfarne and was sent south to bring Christianity to the East Saxons. He built it among the ruins of Othona, the abandoned Roman fort that had stood on this spot for centuries before him. The stone he used to build it is the same stone the Romans had quarried hundreds of years earlier.
The Dengie Peninsula is still barren and desolate today, and I wanted the photographs to show that landscape in context with the chapel rather than treating the building as an isolated subject. The wheat field is a reminder that whoever lived and worshipped here would have farmed this land too, scraping a living from marsh and clay, a simple subsistence existence with nothing grand about it at all.
The path leading to the chapel is the final stretch of St Peter’s Way, a 41 mile route that starts at Chipping Ongar near the edge of London’s sprawl and finishes here, at the edge of England. Pilgrims have walked it for over a thousand years, and the route still ends the same way it always has, on foot, across open marsh, with the chapel waiting at the end of it.
The interior shots both look back out through the door, towards the landscape and the Way beyond, because that’s really what the building has always been about. A point of arrival, not a destination in itself. The altar and cross show how plain the place is inside. No grandeur, nothing to distract from why you came. And the final image, the long abandoned lookout tower nearby, is there to underline just how isolated and exposed this stretch of coast still is. The chapel hasn’t softened with time. If anything, the emptiness around it has only got more obvious.
I was invited to visit St Peter’s to photograph it by Tracy Gomez, an RPS member, as part of an RPS project called Talk-Walk-Talk, with the topic of photographing Sites of Religious Significance.
