What next for Downside Abbey?

The beautiful abbey church at Downside is one of the great master pieces of the Gothic Revival, with furnishings to match. Pevsner described it as “the most splendid demonstration of the renaissance of Roman Catholicism in England…Pugin’s dream of the future of English Catholicism at last come true”. The late Fr Anthony Symondson SJ wrote: “In the diversity of hands that have contributed to the design, in its lack of uniformity, it equals the building development of medieval Gothic.”

Between 1605 and 1607, a group of English and Welsh Benedictine monks from various continental monasteries gathered at Douai, in Flanders, with a desire to set up an exiled English monastic house. Among them was Dom Sigebert Buckley, who had taken monastic vows at Westminster Abbey under Mary I in the late 1550s. The community at Douai, numbering about 24 monks, flourished until 1794 when revolutionary France declared war on England. The community had to leave; the monks lived first at Acton Burnell Hall in Shropshire, courtesy of the Catholic Smythe family.

The community moved in 1814 to Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset, then a remote spot 600 feet above the sea in an area devoted to coal mining and agriculture. The initial estate was some 21 acres. The first chapel was built by the Anglican architect HR Goodridge in Gothic style; Pugin described it as “good, for its date”. This survives as part of the school. In 1839 Pugin produced a design for a great monastic church. Nothing, however, materialised; nor did much of a plan by Charles Hansom in 1846.

It was only in the 1870s that a design by Edward Hanson (a former Downside pupil) and Archibald Dunn, to build a completely new monastery with a dominant abbey church, began to be implemented. The foundation stone was laid on 1 October 1873 by Cardinal Manning, Bishop Brown of Shrewsbury and Bishop Clifford of Clifton. Of the design actually built, the chief memorials are the transepts, the Lady Chapel (left incomplete) and the chapels of St Joseph and St Vedast round the choir.

FA Walters designed the chapels of St Benedict and St Isidore; stained glass was supplied by Nathaniel Westlake.

The Lady Chapel was magnificently decorated between 1896 and 1898 by the great Anglo-Catholic architect Sir Ninian Comper. He was introduced to Downside by the Old Etonian convert (and future monsignor) Arthur Barnes, resident there after his reception into the Church.

Comper installed the groundbreaking altar with riddel posts, curtains and a suspended canopy – the so-called “English altar”. This was supplemented in 1913 by the addition of a reredos and crucifix. Over a number of years he was also responsible for the magnificent glass in the Lady Chapel, the decoration of the exuberant reredos in the St Sebastian Chapel and the blue-and-yellow east window above the choir depicting the mystical glory of a young Christ.

The community at Downside had traditionally been a missionary one with the contemplative, communal nature of traditional Benedictine life largely secondary. Under papal intervention (Leo XIII’s Diu Quidem of 1899), the English Benedictines were instructed to revise their constitutions on traditional monastic lines. Downside was accordingly raised to the status of an abbey.

To reflect this change, the monastic choir was designed by the convert architect Thomas Garner, former business partner of GF Bodley. It was built from 1902 to 1905. This is an essay in the grand manner, symbolising a religious community that had come of age. In Shane Leslie’s words, it seemed “as though Glastonbury were restored, rebuilt for England”. The monks were very conscious of the continuity of Downside with its medieval antecedents. The high altar was, for instance, built from stone taken from the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. Garner himself died in 1906 and was buried in the abbey church.

The church is a repository for a number of important relics: a piece of the True Cross in a 17th-century reliquary; the head of St Thomas of Hereford; the body of the martyred St Oliver Plunkett. The tombs of many of the Vicars Apostolic of the Western District (most notably Dom Augustine Baines) are in the abbey church, as are the tombs of Bishop Morris, Cardinal Gasquet, Abbot Ford and Abbot Ramsay. Many works of art complement the architectural detail. The most evocative of these is the lovely Madonna and Child in dark wood, dating from the 1460s and presented by Cardinal Gasquet; an attempt by the community to sell it a few years ago was frustrated in the courts, which deemed it a fixture of the building. Two Renaissance pictures from the church were, sadly, allowed to be sold.

The abbey church was completed in its current form by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott for Abbot Christopher Butler. The nave, lighter and starker than the east end, dates from 1923 to 1925. It has seven bays and accompanying aisles. His careful design ensured that the interior of the great church now seems a complete unity, harmonious throughout. The “Somerset” tower of 1938 crowns the building and gives it distinction from a distance.

Scott was also responsible for the magnificent choir stalls of 1931. They were moved to their present position when the sanctuary was remodelled in 1968 by Francis Pollen, incidentally in the process realising Comper’s frustrated scheme for a forward-facing altar. In addition, he designed Cardinal Gasquet’s splendid tomb: carved in grey marble, with gilded woodwork above and an alabaster and marble pedestal below. It is one of the great funerary monuments of the 20th century.

The abbey church was consecrated in 1935 and in the same year was raised by Pope Pius XI to the status of a minor basilica.

The story of this once-great monastic establishment has not been so happy in recent years. Battered by falling numbers of monks, financial problems and a condemnatory report on the abbey school by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, the decision was taken to leave the monastery. The school had already been separated, and in 2022 the remnant of the community moved to Buckfast Abbey, in Devon, to discern its next steps.

This great building must have a secure future. The community, after a gap, currently sends a monk from Buckfast each Sunday to celebrate Mass. Romantics such as the author of this column would like to see the new Bishop of Clifton, the Rt Revd Bosco MacDonald, move his cathedral from the 1960s edifice in Bristol to the abbey church at Downside.

It would be more central for the diocese as a whole, and the bishop could surround himself with what is left of the monastic community, looking to medieval precedents. Alas, this is unlikely to happen.

What presumably will have to take place in due course, however, is the setting up of a trust to take on the ownership of the building and ensure that it is properly maintained; it is in a reasonable physical state at present.

On a happier note, there are plans afoot to organise a regular major music festival at Downside Abbey from next summer.

(Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images.)

This article appeared in the special December/January 2025 double edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our thought-provoking and high-calibre magazine and have independent, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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