St. Hugh's Charterhouse, Parkminster

St Hugh’s Charterhouse stands in the quiet parish of Cowfold, West Sussex, on land once called Picknoll. The only post-Reformation Carthusian monastery in Britain, it was built between 1876 and 1883 for French monks forced into exile. A French architect, Clovis Normand, designed the complex in French Gothic Revival style with a generous budget. The church’s spire rises 62 metres above the Sussex countryside, marking the heart of the monastery. Inside, a library holds rare books and manuscripts alongside a chapter house adorned with images of martyred predecessors. Relics of English saints such as Hugh of Lincoln and Roseline of Villeneuve are preserved within the walls.

The Great Cloister stretches 550 metres, one of the world’s longest, linking 34 hermitages to the church and other buildings. It encloses four acres of orchards and the monks’ burial ground, forming a quiet rectangle of daily life. Over the years the number of monks has changed: thirty in 1883, seventy in 1928, twenty-two in 1984, and twenty-six in 2017. In 2024 five hundred solar panels were added to the roofs, expected to cut more than two thousand three hundred tonnes of carbon dioxide over two decades. Pevsner noted that the plan is best appreciated from above, where the symmetry of cloister and spire becomes clear.

Visitors walk beneath the tall spire into a world of stone and silence. The cloister path leads past the hermitages where monks once lived in solitude, now part of the monastery’s routine. The library and chapter house reveal the community’s scholarly and spiritual traditions. Outside, the orchards and burial ground offer a glimpse of the land that has supported this austere life for more than a century. The scale of the cloister and the height of the spire impress even those who know little of monastic orders.