Despite the urban setting, St Peter is a truly rural church, with a pretty round tower, and magnificent Norman north and south doorways. The body of the church was pretty well completely rebuilt in the 1890s, although something of its earlier medieval integrity has been preserved. Now, however, the chancel and nave run under a single roof, and there is no chancel arch anymore. The people of the parish probably think that no one is interested in seeing inside, because ordinarily they keep this church locked, without a keyholder notice. This is a sad reflection on the people of Lowestoft, because in a county where virtually all medieval churches are open every day, or at least accessible with a nearby key, the churches of Lowestoft still lock us all out. I have no doubt that this makes them prey to vandalism, because, as the Churchwatch charity have pointed out, churches which are kept locked all of the time are far more likely to be vandalised than those which are regularly open, they are twice as likely to be broken into, and are even slightly more likely to have something stolen from them. The irony is, of course, that if parishes like this suffer such a loss it tends to make them even less likely to keep the church open, and so the spiral of decline continues.

However, if you can, you step into a pleasantly neat and trim late 19th century interior, albeit rather gloomy from the tinted glass. The building is obviously still well-used and cared for. At the east end, the rather awkward late Victorian triple lancet window contains panels of simple 1960s glass depicting Christ and the parable figures of a fisherman, a sower and a reaper, a nice reference to the main occupations of this part of Suffolk, even if the design itself is not particularly exciting. More pleasing is the view back to the west, down the church to the tower, with good late Victorian furnishings set in a sea of shiny tiles. When these were still relatively new, a wooden cross sent back from the battlefields of the Somme was placed on the west wall beside the tower arch. It comes from the grave of Captain Reginald Charlesworth of Gunton Hall, who was buried at Namps-au-Val to the south-west of Amiens during the German advance of April 1918. He was just 24 years old. Curiously, the Commonwealth War Graves index shows his parents as being Samuel and Catherine Bostock Charlesworth of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire. I thought about this for a moment, and then remembered that Gunton is historically significant for being the source of the clay which was turned into porcelain by Lowestoft factories in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps this family from the Potteries were also involved in the pottery business here, with Gunton Hall as their home?