Introductions to Heritage Assets 19th- and 20th-Century Convents and Monasteries June 2014 INTRODUCTION Convents and monasteries are residential buildings used by members of Christian communities so that they can live a daily religious life detached from everyday pressures. Although the words ‘convent’ and ‘monastery’ can be interchangeable, the former is most often used for buildings established for all-female communities, whilst the latter are usually for men. Even communities – properly, religious orders or congregations – that are dedicated to working within wider society have always required a secluded, self-contained home with a chapel, a refectory, and other communal spaces so that members can retire when necessary to a completely private environment. These buildings are known collectively as ‘religious houses’, a term which refers both to the buildings and to the communities within them – as if they were inseparable. From earliest Christian times, these religious houses took different forms; depending on their history or location, institutions for both sexes might have been known as priories (under a prior/prioress) or abbeys (under an abbot/abbess), or nunneries if they housed only women. Monasteries followed the 6th-century Rule of St Benedict, which provided regulations with some architectural implications for the conduct of daily life. But Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries from the mid-1530s closed down every religious house in England. They made a short comeback during the brief reign of Henry’s daughter Mary I (1553-8), but then vanished, at least from public sight, and were banned by law. From 1559 to 1791, English Catholic Fig 1. A.W.N. Pugin’s Mercy Convent at Bermondsey, 1838 (demolished), his first purpose-designed religious community building, seen from the north-east and drawn for religious life had to find refuge on the Continent, especially the Architectural Review in the 1890s by Francis D. Bedford. in Flanders and France; in the aftermath of the French Revolution, some religious communities there were allowed to settle, or resettle, in England. The subsequent revival of HISTORICAL BACKGROUND religious houses here was due to the eventual acceptance FOUNDING NEW INSTITUTIONS by parliament that Catholics and their religious traditions The first purpose-built monastery to be erected in England should be reintegrated into British society. after the Reformation was a modest structure built in 1795 near East Lulworth in Dorset, for a refugee community of Convents and monasteries were built in large numbers for Trappist monks from France, and in 1820-3 the first new the Roman Catholic Church but also for new Church of monastic buildings of significant size went up, at Downside in England communities. Some religious houses were in rural Somerset. It was, however, a monastery and a series of convents isolated settings, but others were in urban centres, and in built in quick succession from the late 1830s, all designed by the some towns large areas of suburb were visibly dominated gothic revival architect A.W.N. Pugin and inspired by medieval by complexes of religious institutional buildings. These might precedents, that established for most people the form, layout include asylums for ‘fallen women’, orphanages and schools. and style of the modern religious house. So strong was this In many cases existing houses were remodelled or extended image that the principle architectural elements of many of the for monastic use, and these too form part of the history of buildings that followed over the next 50 years scarcely varied the building type. The great period of construction lasted from it, except in terms of their growing size. from the 1850s right up to the First World War, although The reason for the revival of the religious house was the some remarkable buildings were still being built later on. gradual emancipation of Roman Catholics in mainland Today most new buildings are modest replacements for Britain. Until the last decade of the 18th century, English complexes which have become too large for generally Catholics were not allowed to worship in public at all, let much-reduced communities. alone congregate in residential communities. Catholic church services were restricted to the chapels of foreign embassies in London, backstreet chapels, and the private chapels of landed Catholic families. For most people, the medieval idea English Heritage Introductions to Heritage Assets 19th- and 20th-Century Convents and Monasteries 2 Fig 2. A.W.N. Pugin’s 1842 bird’s eye views of his Mercy Convents at Handsworth, 1840 (left, mainly extant; listed Grade II*) and Mount Vernon, Liverpool, 1842 (right; demolished), illustrating their medieval-style cloister plans and easily identifiable major rooms. This illustration was published in his twin articles On the Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England of 1841-2, his influential description of his current projects. of the secluded religious community was associated with Because of the eventual worldwide influence of English revival Roman Catholic worship, tradition and politics, all of which architects and their arts-and-crafts successors, this partnership they had been taught to despise from earliest childhood. gives additional historical and cultural importance to the religious buildings associated with them. In particular, the design This situation changed rapidly because of a series of events and fitting out of convent and monastery chapels, and the and processes that swept across British politics and society. emphasis on communal living inspired by the Middle Ages, have The Catholic Relief Act of 1791 finally permitted Roman left a vivid picture of one particular aspect of Victorian life. Catholic worship, although under considerable restriction. Public response to this was perhaps more favourable than it might LOCATION AND FORM have been, because British politicians prided themselves on Pugin’s design for Mount St Bernard’s, in the Charnwood Forest having offered refuge to French priests forced to leave their in Leicestershire, was not executed precisely in its original form, homeland as a result of the 1789 revolution. It was in fact for a but it provides the exemplar for the Victorian monastery. It colony of English monks, originally exiled from England and now was designed in 1839 for the Cistercian order which since its from France too, that Downside was originally founded in 1814. foundation in the 12th century had sought an isolated setting In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed as a result of for its houses. In common with the many community buildings political developments in Ireland. Thereafter, it became possible that were to follow, this one was funded with private support, to build residential communities for Roman Catholic orders in led by the landowner Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, a local lay Britain, even if in many places these had to face hostility from figurehead associated with the Catholic revival. Here the their neighbours. In fact, some attribute the somewhat fortress- architect envisaged a complex that would closely resemble one like appearance of new convents and monasteries precisely to a of its medieval predecessors: a magnificent chapel with a tower desire for self-protection from angry mobs. and transepts, far bigger than a parish church, with generous communal rooms and cells organised around quadrangles, all The arrival of these new institutions in the 1830s and 1840s set in a landscape suitable for cultivation by the monks. Over coincided with another development in English history: the ‘true’ the course of about a century this vision was gradually realised, gothic revival, based on the authentic historical appreciation of as was notably the case also at Downside Abbey, where Pugin medieval buildings and modern constructional logic, launched himself was briefly involved. in 1836 by both Charles Barry and Pugin’s winning design for the new Palace of Westminster and by the publication of Pugin’s Pugin’s convents, on the other hand, were designed for a new book Contrasts. The growing influence of the revival ran hand- community, the Sisters of Mercy, which ministered to the poor in-hand with the commissioning of new religious buildings of all on the fringes of towns and cities which had recently become kinds, to the extent that some of the highest-regarded monastic home to many Irish immigrants who had fled poverty and buildings are gothic revival ones. Revival architects directly famine in their homeland. The first was by the River Thames addressed church leaders, who were anxious to demonstrate at Bermondsey (1838; Fig 1); others followed at Handsworth their authority through the erection of prestigious buildings. (Fig 2), which at the time was a small village near Birmingham; English Heritage Introductions to Heritage Assets 19th- and 20th-Century Convents and Monasteries 3 Fig 3. The cloister at A.W.N. Pugin’s 1844 extension to his original Mercy Convent, Fig 4. A.W.N. Pugin’s Mount Vernon convent in Liverpool was extended many times by its Handsworth, in the West Midlands. Listed Grade II*. Photographed in 2006. original architect and others before its demolition. The central block seen here is part of the 1842 courtyard scheme. Mount Vernon (Figs 2, 4), on the eastern edge of Liverpool; Some convents, including Pugin’s at Handsworth (Fig 3), eventually on the western fringe of Nottingham; and at Old Swan, then a grew to include substantial ‘magdalen asylums’, or ‘mercy houses’: hamlet outside Liverpool. Pugin also designed a small convent residential institutions for ‘fallen women’. These were not only at Cheadle, Staffordshire, as part of a complex of buildings a Catholic phenomenon: by 1903 there were 238 Anglican designed for his patron, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had led penitentiaries for women. In some suburban areas these religious the funding campaigns for many of his buildings: the site here complexes were eventually built on so large a scale, and in is dominated by his splendid church of St Giles and a small such close proximity to one another, that they dominated the school, and a house in a neighbouring street was converted townscape.