After one hundred years – and one hit television series – an order of nuns will be leaving their convent in Swaffham, Norwich.
The Daughters of Divine Charity convent, the setting of the 2017 Channel 5 series Bad Habits, Holy Orders, has been put up for sale, and the resident sisters moving to one of their order’s sister houses in the UK. The decision was made after the closure of the Sacred Heart independent school in 2019 – after which the nuns felt they would be more useful elsewhere.
Speaking to the Tablet, Sister Francis, a Daughter of Divine Charity and a resident of the convent, said that the convent, which once accommodated 81 boarders and 12 sisters, was now far too large for the remaining sisters, and that they current have “nothing to do”.
Although the school building, now leased to the Diocese, continues to be used as a school, the Sacred Heart Primary School, it is no longer attached to the convent. The convent itself is a pre-reformation building, with ties to the Catholic Church stretching back centuries before the sister’s arrival in 1920. Friends of the congregation are keen to have the building be used for Catholic purposes, according to Sister Francis: one proposal is for the complex to be converted into a pilgrimage centre, given Swaffham’s close proximity to Walshingham. The property is currently on the open market, however, listed in a local estate agent’s website as “suitable for commercial or residential use”.
The Daughters of Divine Charity, founded in Vienna in 1868, numbers around a thousand sisters worldwide. The order arrived in England in 1914, and have houses in Rochester, Chesterfield and Hunstanton, working in catechesis and care for the elderly. In 2017 the Swafford convent was the site of a reality TV show, Bad Habits, Holy Orders, in which five young women lived at their convent and adopted the sisters’ lifestyle for a month. As part of the programme, the sisters also set up a pop-up soup kitchen in London, entitled “nundos”, where customers were asked to turn off their phones and speak to each other during their meal.
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