The Charterhouse Museum
Charterhouse Square, London

Charterhouse Square stands at a historical crossroads. Shaped by tumultuous moments in religious history, it is a place of leafy seclusion overlooked by the modernist towers of the Barbican, ringed by expensive apartments and a stone’s throw from the bustling Smithfield meat market.

It is easily overlooked: and so too within it is the Charterhouse, an almshouse founded in 1611 out of the dissolved remains of an ancient monastery. Forty “brothers” (as the residents are known) still live there. And now, for the first time in its history, it is open to the public as it houses London’s newest museum; it is a museum with one of the richest religious histories of any in the capital.

It was here in 1371 that a Carthusian monastery was founded, lasting just over a century and a half before being dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537. For four years while he was a student of law, St Thomas More was “religious lyvinge” at the Charterhouse. This is the heart of monastic London: a quarter of a mile away is the twelfth-century former Augustinian church of St Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest, and Knights Hospitallers’ Clerkenwell Priory, of which only the crypt and gate remain.

Back in Charterhouse Square, one is standing on a plague pit, the burial site of victims of the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century; it is sobering to think that the original graveyard was maybe five times the size of the present square.