Team rebuilding the past at site of former abbey
Volunteers camp out at historic remains
A team of 100 people are this week hard at work restoring two of Maidstone’s most historic buildings.
The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) has been running its week-long summer restoration camp at Boxley Abbey. Two projects, each once part of the medieval abbey, are being worked on simultaneously.
One is the Grade-II listed former St Andrew’s Chapel in Boarley Lane, Boxley, known as the Old House Project, which once housed Sandling Village Post Office.
The other building, only a few hundred metres away, is
thought to have once been the ‘hospitium’ for the many pilgrims visiting the abbey on their way to worship at the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury. A hospitium was a place visitors could find rest and hospitality. Or the building may simply have been a large tithe barn for sheltering the abbey’s animals and storing its crops.
SPAB, which was founded in 1877 by the textile designer and conservationist William Morris, hopes the building’s history will become clearer as their work progresses.
Boxley Abbey was a Cistercian monastery founded in 1146.
It was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537. The abbey building was largely demolished and the remains converted into a private house, but parts of the gatehouse, the perimeter wall and various features of the monks’ gardens remain, in varying stages of decay.
The hospitium or barn is owned by the Best-Shaw family who currently live in the abbey house and whose ancestors have
owned the estate since 1890.
St Andrew’s Chapel, which is a little more modern, dating from 1484, was also converted to a house after the dissolution. It was once owned by the Tudor poet Thomas Wyatt and was said to house an important religious relic – the finger of St Andrew. It was largely occupied by tenant farmers until around 1890, when the tenant then in residence, Frederick Mannering, opened a grocery shop in part of the premises.
Later, probably around 1931, the shop became the village
post office and functioned as such until 1969.
Since then, the building, which is Grade-II listed, had been left to rot and was placed on the national Heritage at Risk Register.
SPAB purchased the building for around £60,000 in 2018.
It wants to sympathetically restore the building, using traditional building and craft techniques, so that it can become a home again, and thus secure its long-term future.
At the same time, it is using the opportunity to teach restoration
techniques to its volunteers and students to ensure traditional skills are not lost.
SPAB spokesman Felicity Martin said: “When we first bought the house, it was so over-grown with vegetation, you could hardly see it.”
The restoration is expected to last at least another five years.
Ms Martin added: “SPAB is very happy to do everything slowly, because we want to do it all properly.”
A number of archeological digs near the site are also taking place.