St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough

St Michael’s Abbey stands on a quiet rise above Farnborough in Hampshire. A Benedictine monastery, it belongs to the Subiaco Cassinese Congregation and keeps alive the Latin liturgy with Gregorian chant. The abbey church shelters a crowned statue of Saint Joseph and a fine two-manual organ built by Cavaillé-Coll. Beneath the church lies an imperial crypt built for Napoleon III and his son, the Prince Imperial, designed like the basilica of Saint-Denis. Empress Eugénie chose this spot for prayer and silence, and she rests there beside her family. The abbey’s flamboyant Gothic church was drawn by the French architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur. The community has known many changes since its founding in 1881. After the First World War the monks kept the Catholic Central Library, later renamed the Catholic National Library. Dom Fernand Cabrol guided the house for thirty-four years and worked with Dom Henri Leclercq on scholarly editions. Dom André Wilmart, a noted medievalist, lived and worked here. In 1905 the present organ was installed, its craftsmanship matching the best of its maker’s art. By 1947 the community had dwindled, but it was rebuilt with English monks from Prinknash and in 2006 elected its first English abbot. Visitors enter a church of soaring vaults and rich colour. The high altar is flanked by a side chapel holding the crowned statue of Saint Joseph. The imperial crypt below holds three granite sarcophagi beneath a vault modelled on Saint-Denis. The organ case stands at the west end, its pipes rising above the nave. The abbey press still prints books and cards, and the library once held one of England’s finest collections of Roman Catholic works. Outside, the hilltop site looks across Hampshire’s gentle countryside.