The Coventry Society visited the Charterhouse on Thursday 13th July 2023. Peter Walters, Chair of the Society, writes…..
Just three months after opening to the public, Coventry’s newest visitor attraction already looks well bedded in.
On a sunny afternoon the cafe is busy, the stunning gardens are blazing with colour and a monastic calm has settled on the Charterhouse itself.
The last time the Coventry Society made a formal visit, hard hats were the order of the day and many areas inside the main building were out of bounds. Completion seemed years away.
This time, around 25 members strolled over the river bridge and in through the front porch for a guided tour that began in what was once the Carthusian Prior’s ground floor quarters, a surprisingly generous space for a monastic order that prided itself on its asceticism.
In one corner of the room a narrow stone staircase winds its way upstairs into what would have been the prior’s bedroom. Was it merely a staircase to sleep or was it access to a pulpit from which the top man could address his little flock of just twelve monks?
It’s a question for which there is no answer yet and that is the case for so much of what you can see on a Charterhouse tour.
Upstairs, among the extraordinary wall paintings that have turned the Charterhouse from merely a city treasure into a nationally important fourteenth century survivor, we still don’t know exactly what they characterise and who they represent. Meanings and symbols still elude the experts. And that’s one of the joys of the place.
There’s much still to do at the Charterhouse. Restoration work continues on its eighteenth-century coach house to convert it into a restaurant for Michelin chef-starred Glyn Purnell, while the Historic Coventry Trust would dearly love to re-build one of the monks’ cells, traces of which lie beneath the lawns behind the house. If only they could secure the funding.
Yet already it feels as if we’ve known it forever.
The next public event at the Charterhouse is Beneath Your Feet on the weekend of July 29 and 30 (10am – 4pm), a chance for all the family to explore some of Charterhouse’s secrets as part of the National Festival of Archaeology. On July 29 (10am to 12 noon) there’s also a Stitch and Draw workshop with local artist Michala Gyetvai. Details on the Historic Coventry Trust website.