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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. |
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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.
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