St Peter is a landmark church on the north side of Stoke Bridge, overlooking a busy junction. When the church was built, the river was wider, and this must have been a waterside church. It is the first of a line of three medieval dockside churches about 150m apart. Its fine west tower makes it seem much bigger than it actually is, and the great view when approaching from the south or west is a modern, unfamiliar one; until 20 years ago, this church was surrounded by urban clutter. St Peter's tower has not been seen from a distance like this for hundreds of years, and perhaps never, because this has always been an urban, industrial parish. Indeed, because this is the oldest part of Ipswich, it is perhaps England's longest continually occupied urban parish.

Views from the east, however, are dismal and more typical. After this church was declared redundant in the early 1970s, it fell into a terrible state, at the time the most pitiful of all Ipswich churches. When St Peter was made redundant this was a far less busy area, and it was easy for vandals to break in and cause damage. This church was important enough for George Gilbert Scott to have been responsible for the considerable 1870s restoration of the nave and chancel, but this Victorian work seems to be nearing the end of its structural life. The land here is very soft, and although St Peter doesn't suffer the problems that caused the closure of adjacent St Mary at Quay, there were cracks in the nave walls that have had to be urgently addressed.

As at St Stephen and St Lawrence, the main entrance is from the west, and there are elaborate niches flanking the doorway. This view has benefited greatly from the late 1990s restoration, of which more in a moment. To the east, the factory has been demolished, and this whole area is now part of Ipswich's biggest regeneration programme since the 1960s, the Waterside development. Soon, St Peter's neighbours will include an apartment block more than 20 storeys high, and the dockside silos and factories are being replaced by designer flats, bars and hotels. The wet dock itself is now a large marina. One day, this may well be a wonderful setting for the church. For now, it is still a bit of a building site.

Inside, the damage caused by vandalism, settlement and weather are readily apparent. The east window is still partly boarded up (at one time, they all were) and the paint has peeled from the walls. Virtually all the fixtures have gone, and so there is a poignancy about the way the altar and pulpit are dressed. The Ipswich Historic Churches Trust, which took over the care of St Peter, allowed it to be used by a model railway club for nearly 20 years. The nave was tightly packed with model train layouts, the arcades draped with electric cables, making a proper appreciation of the integrity of the interior impossible. This church was terribly uncared for, and it all seemed a shame.

This church was only open on the Historic Churches bike ride day, (unless, of course, you joined the model railway club), but a visit was always desirable, because St Peter has one great treasure. It has the finest black Tournai marble font in England. There are only 9 others. It is a mystery why the Anglican diocese allowed this to remain in such a vulnerable building when so much else - organ, benches, fittings - had been removed.

When a church falls redundant, the font is often the first thing to go, pressed into service at some other church. But here, the massive black square block remains, brooding, with its primitive carvings of lions. Once seen, this 12th century art treasure is never forgotten. And yet, for 364 days a year, the town's most important early-medieval artifact was locked away with the train-sets and the damp. Few decisions could have been more short-sighted. But it survived, of course, and has no doubt survived much worse over the centuries, and sits just to the east of the soaring tower arch.

St Peter's other treasure is the so-called 'Wolsey's gateway', a watergate which is all that remains of the school planned by Cardinal Wolsey as a feeder to his Oxford college. The school was never completed, its stone taken for use elsewhere in the town. The gateway itself, built into St Peter's south churchyard wall, is of mild interest, I suppose, its crest and brickwork eaten away by acidic fumes from the thousands of cars that pass within a few feet everyday. I don't suppose the Victorian factory fumes did it much good either.

In 1999, there was a chance of a business use for St Peter. Acorn Office Supplies, an established office equipment firm out on one of the industrial estates, were looking for a town centre showroom. The model railway club were sent packing, and the building was given an extensive (and essential) programme of restoration, revealing superb exterior flintwork, as bubbly as lace. Planning permission was obtained to convert St Peter into offices and a showroom for Acorn.

The firm was full of promises about allowing access to the font, which would have been a great thing for the town. Unfortunately, when John Blatchly of the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust wrote to me in November 2001 it was to say that Acorn Office Equipment had withdrawn. This is a great disappointment to us, he wrote, for the public were to have had access to much of the building during office hours, there would have been no permanent changes to the fabric of the building, and significant improvements would have been made to the building’s facilities and decorative state.

There had never been a satisfactory commercial reuse of a medieval church in Ipswich, and it wasn't going to happen this time. Chastened perhaps by the possible ultimate cost of the conversion, Acorn remained on their industrial estate. And, of course, they were correct to do so, because nowadays who in their right mind would go into a town centre to look at office furniture, when there is a perfectly good supplier on the edge of town?

So, what should happen to St Peter? In this redevelopment area, everything is up for grabs; a borough that can give planning permission for a 23 storey block beside a medieval church is presumably capable of doing more or less anything to the church itself. St Peter's tower has become a landmark, an essential part of the townscape, and the font is a national treasure. Perhaps the way forward is to primarily consider the conservation of these two features, perhaps by demolishing the rest of the structure and turning it into a garden, perhaps entered through Wolsey's gateway. The font could then be enclosed beneath the tower by a glass atrium to east of the elegant tower arch. This may sound radical, but this is an area where radical ideas are currently being implemented, and is no more radical than the Brooke Report of the 1960s which advised that redundant medieval churches should be demolished and the land sold.

There are many differences between the Britain of thirty years ago, when St Peter became redundant, and the Britain of today. Primarily, of course, we are now a rich country, and can afford the luxury of maintaining our priceless heritage more than we could then - unless we plan to cash in the family silver and spend the proceeds on the bombing of Middle Eastern countries, of course.

Secondly, a vast heritage industry has grown up in that time; people are now obsessed with the past, and historically themed villages and electronically enhanced 'experiences' cater for their hunger. There's nothing we like so much these days as a wander through a Viking town, or watching a medieval cobbler at work, or various troops of the Civil War beating seven shades out of each other.

Thirdly, there is a hunger for a sense of the numinous; people are searching for something that they didn't seem to want thirty years ago. Sometimes this is satisfied by New Age mysticism, but the Churches still have a lot to offer - the Church of England seems to have at last begun to grasp that most people don't want to attend Sunday services, but they may still want to wander into a church and look around, and to sit and to meditate. People go into a church when they want to pray or if they only want a good cry. They won't necessarily come back on Sunday - although, of course, they might - but the church building itself offers them a spiritual shelter, at least if it is open during the day, which most in Ipswich town centre are.

Fourthly, there is a huge passion in North America and Australia for tracing ancestral roots. Look at the visitors book in any East Anglian village church; a large proportion of the names will be of people returning to the village that their ancestors left perhaps centuries ago. They always make for the church. This wasn't the case thirty years ago.

Fifthly, television and books have created a fascination with art and architecture that most people did not tap into before. Programmes about churches and castles have unbelievably large followings. People can tell you what a clerestory is and what a hammerbeam was for in a way that they couldn't in the past.

It seems to me that all these points need to be taken into account when considering the future of redundant medieval churches.

The Ipswich Historic Churches Trust still seems stuck in the 1980s, pursuing commercial solutions to the problem of finding new uses for its empty churches. But as a member of the IHCT committee confided in me, this is not going to happen; not at St Peter, and not at most of the other redundant churches. No business is going to pour cash into old buildings with poor service access, when there are now so few restrictions on building afresh on brownfield and even greenfield sites. There will never be a commercial use for this building. But the future, if it exists, must be a sustainable one. What can be done to make people actually want to go to St Peter, and to persuade us that it is worth paying for, through our taxes or even through our pockets?

St Peter, College Street, Ipswich, is open from 2pm to 4pm on Thursdays, May-September.

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