THE MONASTERY BUILDINGS

THE WEST WING

The main monastery building stands at the West of the Abbey Church. It comprises the community rooms on the ground floor and the monks’ cells in the upper storeys. It is part of the work planned at Downside by Dunn and Hansom. Nikolaus Pevsner speaks dourly of its ‘dismal Victorian neo-Gothic’ style, ‘restless without being picturesque’. This judgement is unfair to some aspects of interior, such as the West Cloister and the staircase, which are certainly attractive. Nor does it take the history of the building into account.

Initially only two storeys were built, and a building on that scale would definitely have been better proportioned. But the developments in the last twenty years of the Nineteenth century, known as the ‘monastic controversy’, led to many changes. One of them was the construction at Downside of a Novitiate for the young monks of our Community. Much more room was needed and the top two floors of the current building were added.

The result is a spacious living wing for the community, set apart from the school and secluded in its own area, but connected to the school by the Petre Cloister, running parallel to the Church on the North side, as well as by the Weld Cloister (with the modern building above) in the East Wing.