Nave

The tall nave has six-bay arcades of pointed moulded arches with octagonal capitals carried on octagonal piers of Purbeck marble.

The original tile floors to the nave and aisles were covered with cork tiles in 1965. This was in an effort to conserve heat, as was the hardboard covering the original ceiling. The cork tiles are in the process of being uncovered to reveal the original floor. There is a double arched opening with a screen (now glazed) to the vestry space originally intended as an oratory.

The small triangular clerestory windows have quatrefoil tracery. The soffits of the nave and aisle roofs originally had painted decoration but were panelled with boards in 1965. The timber principals and wall-posts of the aisle roofs are still exposed.

St Joseph‘s altar

St Joseph‘s altar designed by Pugin, features a statue of St Joseph standing in a canopied niche inside the window embrasure It is open to the left aisle as you enter the church.

The 19th Century timber nave benches are of simple design with pierced quatrefoils in the ends. The quatrefoil shape is echoed throughout the church, benches, window tracery, emblems and monograms on the Blessed Sacrament chapel ceiling, the sedilia seat tops, and even the heating grilles are of a quatrefoil design.    

In the aisles the Stations of the Cross are thought to be Belgian, dating from the 1890s.

Headstops

The Purbeck marble piers of the nave arches have simple capitals, but the corbels in the nave and aisles were chiselled in Caen stone with heads revealing references to the story of Catholicism in England.

 It is believed that the headstops above the nave are saints, and those above the side aisles are pilgrims. 

Research has suggested that the following names could be attributed to some of the heads: Pope Gregory, St. Augustine and various Anglo-Saxon saints, kings and bishops, princesses and abbesses such as, Ethelbert, Edmond, Edward the Confessor, Dunstan and Winifred, Bede, Mildred of Minster and Hilda of Whitby, Margaret of Scotland, Thomas a Becket and Julian of Norwich and St George.

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