London’s Charterhouse, a former 14th-century Carthusian monastery and burial ground for victims of the Black Death, will open its doors to the public for the first time in 400 years on Friday.
Visitors will be able to walk across the graves of thousands of Londoners, and enter the secret world of the medieval charity that is still operating in the heart of the capital. A new museum and the chapel, which holds the founder’s grand tomb, will welcome the public in six days a week.
One of 13 victims of the Black Death who were recently excavated when the Crossrail project clipped the corner of Charterhouse Square, just north of the City, now lies in a glass case in the museum lit by electric candles.
Dominic Tickell, who has managed the £4.2m Heritage Lottery Fund-backed project to open the doors of the previously closed world, said the man’s remains were on display – after much discussion – because the Charterhouse began in 1348 as an enormous Black Death cemetery on fields bought by Sir Walter Manny on the edge of Smithfield.
Up to 55,000 Londoners are said to have been buried there including Manny, who established a Carthusian monastery to pray for the souls of the dead.
The charity providing homes for 60 poor men and 40 poor scholars came in 1611, through the will of Sir Thomas Sutton, who had made his fortune in coal and armaments. The Charterhouse school, whose past pupils include John Wesley and the writer William Makepeace Thackeray, was moved to Surrey in 1872.
The complex of almshouses, preserved among tower blocks, is surrounded by gardens and cobbled courtyards. They still provide homes for life to 40 men, known as brothers, and for the first time women are now also welcome to apply for places. The institution’s first female master takes over next month.
Anyone applying to be a brother must be over 60, poor and single, and so in need of the support of a community for the rest of their lives. There are now more retired actors, musicians, teachers and clergyman than Sutton’s roll call of “decrepit or old captaynes either at sea or at land, maimed or disabled soldiers, merchants fallen on hard times … by shipwreck or other calamity”.
The 600 years of history traced in the museum, created in partnership with the Museum of London, show that Charterhouse has not always been as tranquil a sanctuary as it seems. The new visitors’ entrance, designed by the architects Eric Parry, through a gate with the motto in old French “virtue is the only nobility”, takes them over the foundations of the medieval monastery and the graves of the monks, through a gap in the buildings ripped by a bomb in the blitz. Elizabeth I and James I came at turbulent times in English politics. In 1538, 18 Charterhouse monks voted not to recognise Henry VIII as the head of the church and were hung, drawn and quartered; their prior’s arm was cut off and nailed to his church door.
The museum includes a case curated by the brothers, giving insights into their daily lives, including menus for meals in the great hall, and a roll call of attendance at daily church services with pin pricks marking those who turned up – attendance is now voluntary, but once absentees were fined. They have also collected ticket stubs proving that theirs is no closed monastic world: they include English National Ballet, the Paris Opera, and a ticket for The Fall contributed by a brother whose next outing is to see Black Sabbath.
“It’s fair to say that some of the older brothers have had reservations, but the trustees have been marvellous,” Tickell said. “When we first suggested opening to the public they said yes immediately – probably because they never thought it would actually happen.”
The Charterhouse museum and chapel open to the public on 27 January. Admission free, but paid tours, some led by the brothers, are also available