Furniture, sculpture and paintings from the vacant monastery at Downside Abbey in Somerset are to be auctioned this week.
The sale on 20 and 21 July at Dominic Winter Auctioneers, near Cirencester, includes tables from the monks’ refectory, antique bookcases and devotional items, many of them gifted by alumni of Downside School down the years.
Eight Benedictine monks, led by Abbot Nicholas Wetz, moved out of their original Grade II* monastery in 2022 to a house in the grounds of Buckfast Abbey, Devon.
They are now known as the Community of St Gregory the Great and join the Buckfast monks for services in the abbey church and meals in the monastery.
The monks left Somerset after years when vocations had all but dried up. They faced serious criticism from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse over their handling of complaints of child abuse at their school.
In recent years, the community has sold a number of items from Downside including, in 2019, two Renaissance paintings from the Grade I listed abbey church.
They were prevented from selling a fifteenth-century Flemish statue of the Madonna and Child when former pupil successfully appealed the decision of the Southern Historic Churches Committee that had initially permitted the sale.
The future of the monastery building, which has been unoccupied since the monks’ departure, remains in doubt. The abbey church is used by Downside School and the local parish, as well as being open to the public.
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In Leeds, England’s only Arts and Crafts cathedral has been awarded almost £100,000 in lottery funding to mark its centenary in 2024.
The money goes to St Anne’s Cathedral to enable stonework repairs to the entrance from St Anne’s Street.
It will also fund the development of resources for school visits and guided tours, training opportunities for volunteer stewards and guides, an in-depth feasibility study of how to improve access and toilet facilities, as well as several other heritage projects to be completed in the coming year.
The cathedral dean, Canon Matthew Habron said: “I am very grateful to all who have made the award of this grant possible, and I look forward to welcoming many more people from across the City of Leeds, and far beyond, to experience the beauty and heritage of this unique cathedral church.”
St Anne’s was designed by John Henry Eastwood (1843-1913) and Sydney Kyffin Greenslade (1866-1955) and includes one of A W N Pugin’s most beautiful altars, which was taken from the city’s earlier cathedral when it was demolished.
The cathedral features in Elena Curti’s Another Fifty Churches to See Before You Die, to be published in September.
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