Although St Peter Hungate is right in the heart of the urban area, its setting is absolutely idyllic; 16th and 17th century cottages flank the north and east sides, and then beautiful Elm Hill drops away below it. To the west is the magnificent chancel window of the Blackfriars church, while to the south are grand 19th century commercial buildings, full of Victorian confidence. Hungate itself no longer exists, but was formerly 'houndsgate', the street of dogs. In this conservation area the roads are still cobbled, and it is an oasis of charm in the middle of East Anglia's biggest city.

St Peter is that rare beast in Norwich: a cruciform church. It looks older than it actually is; the primitive capped tower is actually a tall 15th century one that was truncated in 1906 for safety reasons. In fact, the whole church was completely rebuilt during the middle thirty years of the 15th century. The chancel collapsed after the Reformation, and was rebuilt by the Laudians in the early 17th century. It is a blessing that they reused the 15th century windows, and in fact all the window tracery in the church is still original.

As with St Simon and St Jude at the other end of Elm Hill, St Peter has long been redundant, last being used as a church before the First World War. When, in the 1930s, the Norwich Society went on their pioneering crusade to save this area of the city, there was a renewal of interest in finding appropriate uses for the old churches, and in 1936 St Peter Hungate became a museum of church furnishings. The fixtures and fittings from other redundant churches were brought here for display, and the collection was augmented by items from the Norwich and Norfolk museums, as well as by other churches wanting to find a safe home for their treasures. It was a superb museum, the only one of its kind in England. From a church explorer's point of view, it was a priceless resource; you could read about things, and then go and see them in real life, all in one place: rood screens, bench ends, reredoses, corbels, pyxes and pyx cloths, all at first hand.

St Peter Hungate Museum of Church Art lasted until the late 1990s, when a reorganisation of the museum service in Norwich killed it off. All the exhibits were removed, and most went into storage under the Castle. Today, the building is completely empty.

You enter through the south porch, which leads you into the wide, high empty nave. There are no arcades, no clerestory. The beautiful early 15th century font stands starkly at the west end, fragments of medieval angels in the glass above. Looking east, there is another large collection of medieval glass in the chancel window. Some of this was set here during the church's museum days, but some of it was placed during the 19th century, when St Peter Hungate was one of the highest of Norwich's many Anglo-catholic churches; it was, I am told, the first to use vestments, the first to use incense, the first to use candles on the altar.

There are squints into the transepts, and image niches in the east walls of both; the south transept, which was a chapel for the guild of St John the Baptist, was the burial place of Sir John Paston. High above, the corbels to the roof are well worth a look; they depict the four evangelists, St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke and St John, and the four Latin Doctors of the Church, St Augustine, St Ambrose, St Gregory and St Jerome. This is the only known example of these eight Saints as roofpost stops. There is a central boss of Christ in Majesty.

If you go out through the north door, you find yourself in the former graveyard, now a pleasant garden overlooking the rooftops of Elm Hill. The 15th century building immediately to the north, now a restaurant, was once a beguinage, a retreat house for nuns. The lawn is surrounded by lavender and rosemary, and it is all very well kept. How sad that so few people see it now! As if it was not shame enough that we have lost a wonderful museum, it is equally a pity that a beautiful church is no longer in use for anything at all.

Simon Knott, November 2005