Friday lunch was indeed at the Charterhouse, my second visit. Last year I went in the evening for a tour of the interior. On Friday we took a look at the outside; it was jolly chilly.
You’d think I might know my way around by now but it is a warren of courtyards, staircases and passages. I strongly recommend a visit; the Chapel alone is worth the detour. Don’t wait too long because the new chairman of the governors with his new broom may not want to receive two plaudits garnered last year. From UK Heritage Awards: “Best Hidden Gem.” From VisitEngland: “Gold Winner, Small Visitor Attraction of the Year”.
It has a surfeit of history. In the 14th century it was a Black Death burial ground until 1371 when it went white as a Carthusian Priory – the London Charterhouse. There was a prior and twenty-four monks until the Reformation. But you must visit and see all this for yourself.
Meanwhile, let’s digress and muse on whether the United Kingdom is as fractured now as it was in 1535 when Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy was as divisive as Article 50. Funnily enough I’d rather like to see some of today’s protagonists hanged, drawn and quartered. The prior and many of his monks were brutally executed at the Tower and Tyburn. The French are a backward nation, although at least they did have a revolution more than a century before Imperial Russia. Thinking about the sad end of the Carthusian monks I recall Poulenc’s Dialogue of the Carmelites – so far as I know the only opera score with a part written for guillotine.
By 1611 the dust had settled and Thomas Sutton bought the Tudor mansion that had been built on the site of the monastery. He set up a charity to educate boys and care for elderly gentlemen and this continues. The boys moved to Godalming in 1872 and the elderly gentlemen remain in London on a 7 1/2 acre site, a biscuit’s throw from the Barbican.
The Charterhouse rocks.