St Joseph’s Catholic Church

A brief history….

The date of the founding of St Joseph’s is given in the Diocesan Directory as 1792. At that point it was not yet St Joseph’s, but it was in that year that Father Toussaint Duval was appointed Missionary Apostolic to a French chapel in Southampton. Fr Duval received faculties from the Bishop to hear the confessions of English people, and it is known they would attend Mass. This ‘chapel’ was a room at 67 High Street, where Fr Duval lodged.

In 1824 Fr James Watkins was sent to Southampton, while there he found that the chapel was too small for the expanding congregation, and set about collecting money for a larger chapel in Bugle Street. The first church of St Joseph was small and covered only the space occupied by the sanctuary, side altars and sacristy of the present church. It was entered from Bugle Street by a door which was probably in the same position as the present door, now unused. It was also connected by a door in the side wall of the church into a passage still existing leading into the house, where the room on the ground floor facing Bugle Street was used as a sacristy. The altar was positioned in the present sacristy, where the piscina may still be seen. The opening ceremony was performed by Bishop Bramston on 28th of October 1830 and the sermon was preached by Conon Thierry, chaplain to the Duke of Norfolk.

This was the first Catholic church to be opened in Southampton since the Reformation, and the very first in England to be dedicated to Saint Joseph.

By 1842 this church was deemed too small, the congregation rising to over 600. A letter of the time states that “on Sundays, the chapel is so full that there is scarce standing room in the aisles, not to mention the number that cannot gain admittance”. It was then decided that it was necessary to build a larger church, and whilst it was being pulled down, the congregation went to the Pepper Alley Chapel.

Fr Sidden chose A.W.M. Pugin as the architect, a leader in the revival of gothic architecture. The first stone of the altar was laid in March 1843. During the process of building they advanced too much money to the builder and ran out of funds to finish the church, which meant the plans ended up being revised by a local surveyor and architect J.G. Poole.

St Joseph’s was the largest church in the South of England outside London until the Restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850, and remained the largest in the area covered by the Diocese of Portsmouth until the building of the Cathedral in 1882.