The chapel was saved, thanks to a timely shutting of the door
from the cloisters, but the ranges around the quadrangles called
Master’s Court and Wash-house Court, which look like the ancient
parts of an Oxford college like Merton, were gutted. Although
reconstruction was far from inevitable, these were restored, and
their stone and diapered brick walls retain a deceptive air of
unchangeable tranquillity. Forty old men live there to this day,
as in 1611 Sir Thomas Sutton, the founder of Sutton’s Hospital
in Charterhouse, hoped. Those wartime bombs revealed the hidden
history of the medieval priory of Carthusian monks, built here
in 1371. Of course, many later additions – a brick vaulted
Elizabethan gallery, Jacobean plasterwork (above, showing
“Charity”), 19th-century castellated Tudor walls – mix
pleasingly with the buildings from the Middle Ages. Indeed it is
shameful to recall that buildings by Edward Blore, the Victorian
improver of Lambeth Palace, were cheerfully pulled down in 1951.
He was in good compa