The Church and its History 
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
Our Gothic church, which is an outstanding example of the work of Victorian architect E.W.Pugin, seats only three hundred, requiring us to celebrate five Sunday Masses so that we can worship compactly but comfortably.
While we can't all meet together in worship, we can choose the time and the kind of worship we find most helpful, from a 'low' (said) Mass, through Masses with music groups and modern songs, to a more solemn Mass with organ and choir.
We can also have three Masses most weekdays, the first being 7 am. See our Mass timetable for further information.
The church, opened in 1858, is a fine Gothic building with notable stained glass windows, the largest of which is "Doom", erected in 1923, depicting the Last Judgement. In 2000 we added a "Jubilee" window of outstanding design. Parishoners and friends donated over £16,000, enabling us to give £8,000 to five charities depicted in it.
For over one hundred years our church was a devotional chapel with a congregation of local residents and pilgrims from the city who came to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour which had been established in 1866. However, in 1961 with homes having swallowed up the farms and fields around us, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Heenan, asked us to become a parish with all its responsibilities, and since then our numbers have increased threefold.
