January 17, 2006
Selling the abbey to save it?
Doesn't sound like a sound plan for salvation, as Richard Morrison sees it:
Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire. . . an enclosed community of 24 nuns — average age 65, three in wheelchairs — is being uprooted, unwillingly it seems, from a home occupied by this Benedictine order for 170 years. The nuns will be separated from their historic archive of 50,000 books. And their wonderful Victorian abbey church, perhaps E. W. Pugin’s finest building, could end up sliced into maisonettes. . .The Abbess, who in Benedictine law has total control over what happens within the abbey walls, thinks that the cost of modernising is prohibitive. So Stanbrook’s buildings and lovely grounds, below the Malverns, are on the market for £6 million. The nuns have been told that after the sale they will be put in temporary blocks until a purpose-built home is constructed — on the Yorkshire moors, of all places.
The irony is that this new nunnery is expected to cost £8 million. So the Benedictines will still need to find an extra £2 million. Yet presumably if they could find £2 million they could do the necessary upgrading to Stanbrook, and a lot more besides.
Posted by David on January 17, 2006 10:59 AM
Talk about shades of In This House of Brede!
Godden based the house on Stanbrook -- so I guess the subplot about an imperious abbess's fiscal/physical plant misstep endangering the abbey comes vividly true, too.
Posted by: Michael Tinkler on January 18, 2006 7:53 AM
The intended destruction of Stanbrook is a tragedy waiting to be averted. Were the Abbess to agree to share the Pugin buildings with another reduced community, the problem, which she alone has created, would be solved. The affair is a true Scandal for order, community, Church. And an architectural scandal too. Muriel Spark used Stanbook during her research for THE ABBESS OF CREWE. The current scenario makes ABBESS OF CREWE look like as vicarage tea party ... and 150 dead nuns must be wrenched from the earth too and dragged to the Yorkshire moors... ? ... the entire comminity ia appalled at that wretched " detail " ...
Pete Barrymore
Posted by: Pete Barrymore on January 27, 2006 4:13 AM
The situation of cynically mismanaged decline and mendacity at Stanbrook Abbey represents quite a triumph for mediocrity over excellence. The solution is of course to share the distinguished buildings - almost a village - with another reduced community. Here SYLVIA PLATH stayed incognito during her last years, here Siegfried Sassoon, Alec Guinness, Muriel Spark and others sought solace and solitude. Now : it must be destroyed. The Abbess leads the community into the dark. Shame.
Posted by: Bryn Barrymore on February 15, 2006 4:20 AM
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