In early times St Peter's church was known as the 'Great' to distinguish it from St Peter the Little which was a chapel at the royal castle of Worcester. By the 1830s it was picturesque but in a ruinous condition; and it was demolished in 1838. A new church was built with the aid of a government grant, designed in brick by the Worcester architect, John Mills, in the early Victorian Gothic style so much despised by later Victorians who came to regard it as 'the ugliest church in the City'. It was a typical 'prattling box' of the period, with few decorative features but it held a lot of people. The tombs from the old church were put in the spacious crypt which, like most in the city churches in the 19th century, was a charnel house. St Peter's was demolished in 1976.