In a recent article, I reflected on those religious houses in London that, after centuries of absence, have in some sense been revived or re-founded following the gradual easing of restrictions brought about by Catholic Emancipation in the nineteenth century.. Among these, two modern foundations stand out in personal as well as historical terms: St Dominic’s Priory, where we attended Mass on Palm Sunday, and Erith, a Franciscan community of particular significance for my family. My godmother, a friend of my mother, lies buried in the nearby municipal cemetery, giving the site an added layer of personal resonance. Ealing Abbey, a Benedictine foundation, is another post-Dissolution house I have visited, though it does not share the same personal connections.
At St Dominic’s, the Dominican presence offers a living continuity all part of the same great religious tradition that once shaped the spiritual and physical landscape of London. Erith, the Franciscan site, illustrates how modern foundations can carry deep personal and historical resonance. That awareness—of past and present quietly coexisting—forms a natural bridge to the older, vanished monastic world.
If the modern foundations represent continuity restored after centuries of absence, the earlier monasteries of London tell a very different story: one of destruction, dispersal, and near-erasure. Yet even here, the past has not entirely disappeared. Three sites in particular—Charterhouse, Bermondsey Abbey, and Lesnes Abbey—still allow us to see something of what once existed.
Charterhouse is the most complete survival. Though much altered and incorporated into later buildings, it preserves the essential structure of a Carthusian monastery. Having visited it last year, I was struck by how much remains legible: the cloister, the arrangement of cells, the sense of enclosed, ordered life. It does not present itself as a ruin in the conventional sense, but rather as a place where the monastic past has been absorbed into the present without being entirely lost. In this respect, the Charterhouse offers perhaps the clearest “summary” of what a London monastery once was.
Bermondsey Abbey represents the opposite extreme. Here, only fragments survive—low walls and traces embedded in the modern city. It is a place that demands imagination. What once stood as a major Cluniac house is now reduced to outlines and hints. And yet, there is something powerful in that very absence. It reminds us how completely the Dissolution—and the centuries that followed—transformed London’s religious landscape.
Lesnes Abbey holds a particularly personal connection, as it is near where we have lived for most of our time in London. I had a chance to revisit it yesterday in a day which could only be described as one of stormy and very windy April weather. The abbey sits in a wonderfully natural setting, with bluebells and daffodils carpeting the surrounding woods in spring. Structurally, the site is remarkably complete. While much of the walls are gone, the layout of the main abbey church, the Lady Chapel, the cloisters, the chapter house, the refectory, the dormitory, the library, and even the lavatory are all clearly discernible. One can easily reconstruct the monastic life and rhythm just by walking the site—a truly immersive history lesson.

The local council has done much to help explain the significance and importance of the Abbey originally built as a penance by Sir Richard de Lucy for his part in the murder of Saint Thomas a Becket.
The abbey is also brought back to life through liturgical tradition. Each year, the local Catholic parish uses Lesnes Abbey for its Easter procession, reconnecting the ruins with living faith and ritual. This continuity of devotion, coupled with the surrounding beautiful woods some of the largest areas of greenery in London, makes Lesnes Abbey not just a relic of the past, but a place where history, nature, and spiritual life intersect.
All these places—however fragmentary or preserved—stand as reflections of something that is not confined to the past. The destruction of monasteries in 16th-century England was not merely an administrative act; it was part of a broader rupture in which buildings of immense cultural, spiritual, and artistic value were dismantled and dispersed. It was, indeed, a cataclysmic disassociation of sensibility, a national trauma which many may feel has never enabled the country to fully recover. London once had over fifty religious institutions. The fact that so little survives is striking, even shocking. Whatever the political and theological motivations behind their suppression, the result was the large-scale loss of places that had embodied centuries of devotion, craftsmanship, and communal life, the destruction of some of the finest examples of religious European art and the disappearance of the finest manuscripts and a huge corpus of music.
This invites a wider reflection. The deliberate destruction of religious and cultural monuments has not disappeared from history. In recent years, we have seen devastating examples in territories controlled by Islamic State, where historic mosques, churches, and archaeological sites were intentionally destroyed. Such acts are often described as iconoclasm: the rejection of images and monuments seen as incompatible with a particular ideology.
There is, of course, a distinction to be made. The damage inflicted on churches and cathedrals during the Second World War was not primarily ideological in this sense, but rather the tragic consequence of war. Yet the result—loss, ruin, and the disappearance of beauty—can feel no less profound.
What emerges, across these different contexts, is a sobering truth: hatred—whether religious, political, or ideological—has the power to destroy beauty. It can erase not only buildings, but the meanings, memories, and human experiences they embodied.
When the ruined sites are considered alongside the modern foundations such as St Dominic’s, Erith, and Ealing Abbey, a kind of dialogue across time becomes visible.
Friars and monks are not the same; modern foundations are not medieval ones. And yet, there is an undeniable thread connecting them—a persistence of religious life in new forms, in new settings, and under new conditions.
London does not offer the grand monastic ruins of other parts of Britain. Instead, it presents something subtler: a landscape in which fragments, survivals, and revivals must be read together. Charterhouse gives us structure. Bermondsey gives us absence. Lesnes gives us atmosphere. And places like St Dominic’s Priory, Erith Friary and Ealing Abbey remind us that what was once lost has, in some measure, returned. For to move between these places is to pass not simply through space, but through layers of history—where memory, loss, destruction, and renewal continue to coexist.