Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Crypt of the Grand Priory Church
Guided tours Tues, Fri & Sat 11am & 2.30pm • £5 donation requested
Of the original twelfth-century church, all that remains is the
Norman crypt
, which
contains two outstanding monuments: a sixteenth-century Spanish alabaster e
gy
of a Knight of St John, and the emaciated e
gy of the last prior, who died of a
broken heart in 1540 following the Order's dissolution. Above ground, the curve
of the church's walls - it was circular, like Temple Church - is traced out in
cobblestones on St John's Square. To visit the Grand Priory Church, you must
take a
guided tour
, which also allows you to explore the gatehouse, including the
mock-medieval Chapter Hall.
10
Charterhouse
Charterhouse Square • By guided tour only April-Aug by appointment • £10 •
T
020 7253 9503,
W
thecharterhouse.org •
!
Barbican
or Farringdon
In the southeast corner of Clerkenwell lies
Charterhouse
, founded in 1371 as a
Carthusian monastery. The Carthusians were the most respected of the religious orders
in London and the only one to put up any significant resistance to the Dissolution of
the Monasteries, for which the prior was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, and
his severed arm nailed to the gatehouse as a warning to the rest of the community. The
gatehouse, on Charterhouse Square, which retains its fourteenth-century oak doors, is
the starting point for the excellent, exhaustive two-hour
guided tours
.
Very little remains of the original buildings, as the monastery was rebuilt as a
Tudor mansion after the Dissolution. The monks lived in individual cells, each
with its own garden and were only allowed to speak to one another on Sundays;
three of their tiny cells can still be seen in the west wall of
Preachers' Court
. he
larger of the two enclosed courtyards,
Masters' Court
, retains the wonderful Great
Hall, which boasts a fine Renaissance carved screen and a largely reconstructed
hammerbeam roof, as well as the Great Chamber where Elizabeth I and James I
were once entertained. The
Chapel
, with its geometrical plasterwork ceiling, is
half-Tudor and half-Jacobean, and contains the marble and alabaster tomb of
Thomas Sutton
, whose greyhound-head emblem crops up throughout the building.
It was Sutton, deemed “the richest commoner in England” at the time, who bought
the place in 1611 and converted it into a charity school for boys (now the famous
public school in Surrey) and an
almshouse
for gentlemen - known as “brothers” -
forty of whom continue to be cared for here.
LENIN IN CLERKENWELL
Virtually every Bolshevik leader spent at least some time in exile in London at the beginning of
the twentieth century, to avoid the attentions of the Tsarist secret police.
Lenin
(1870-1924)
and his wife, Nadezhda, arrived in April 1902 and found unfurnished lodgings at 30 Holford
Square, off Great Percy Street, under the pseudonyms of Mr and Mrs Jacob Richter. Like Marx,
Lenin did his studying in the British Library - L13 was his favourite desk.
The couple also entertained other exiles - including
Trotsky
, whom Lenin met for the first
time at Holford Square in October 1902 - but Lenin's most important job was his editing of
Iskra
with Yuli Martov (later the Menshevik leader) and Vera Zasulich (one-time revolutionary
assassin). The paper was set in Cyrillic script at a Jewish printer's in the East End and run off on
the Social Democratic Federation presses on Clerkenwell Green.
In May 1903, Lenin left to join other exiles in Geneva, though over the next eight years he
visited London on five more occasions. The Holford Square house was destroyed in the Blitz,
so, in 1942, the local council erected a (short-lived)
monument
to Lenin (now in the Islington
Museum). A blue plaque at the back of the hotel on the corner of Great Percy Street
commemorates the site of 16 Percy Circus, where Lenin stayed in 1905.
