AN HISTORICAL NOTE ON THE
WEST HULL PARISHES
Introduction
The increase in the population of Hull in the
19th C. was unprecedented in the town’s history. In 1800 it
was recorded that three thousand people lived in the town and in one hundred
years this figure had swelled to approximately two hundred and fifty thousand,
a considerable proportion of which were Roman Catholics.
Building in the town expanded in three directions,
North, West and East and the population, naturally, followed these three
directions and were housed accordingly. Catholic churches were built to
the North and East of the town centre in the late 19th and early
20th centuries to accommodate growing congregations.
St. Wilfrid’s Parish Church
The first Catholic Church to be erected in West
Hull was the parish church of St. Wildrid’s in The Boulevard and registered
as a place of worship in the General Register Office, Somerset House, Worship
Register, in 1896, a year prior to Hull being given the status of a City.
This structure was destroyed by enemy action
in 1941 and the parishioners had to wait until 1956 for the present church
to be built.
St. Joseph’s Mass Centre and
later Parish Church
In 1926 Canon Wilson, the Parish Priest of St.
Wilfrid’s purchased a Victorian farmhouse situated at the junction of Boothferry
Road and Third Lane (now called Pickering Road) and converted it into a
Mass Centre. Approximately twenty years later a building contractor, assisted
by a group of volunteer parishioners led by Jim Raw, himself a builder,
undertook the work to transform the farmhouse into the church as it is
today. The opening date is something of an anomaly; the ‘Charity Commission
Files’ shows the registration date as a place of worship as 1948 but Canon
Carson’s book ‘The First Hundred Years’ states the opening date was 1950;
this is substantiated by the date 1950 etched into the base of the tabernacle.
Corpus Christi Parish Church
As Kingston upon Hull expanded to the North
West, the need for a new parish arose and so a site was bought on Spring
Bank West and a gothic church was built in red brick. Constructed by a
builder from Bridlington, F. Spink, at a cost of two thousand five hundred
pounds and designed by the Bishop, Thomas Shine of Middlesborough, the
church opened in October 1932.
Adrian E Power
