The Cloisters (Letchworth)

The Cloisters opened on the afternoon of Monday 28 January 1907 in Letchworth, the world's first garden city, built for £20,000 by the Quaker heiress Annie Jane Lawrence to a design she said had come to her in a dream. W. H. Cowlishaw gave her an octagonal tower, spiral-stair turrets and a half-oval open-air room walled with Swedish green marble, where twenty adult students slept in beds hung from the concrete vaulting and studied "how thought affects action". The carving was never finished; the school lasted about four years; the building became a Theosophical meeting place and a concert hall where a deaf woman with an ear trumpet drew audiences of a thousand. The Army wrecked it in the war, the council refused it as a gift, and in 1948 Lawrence gave it to the Freemasons, who still run it. One ghost story attaches to it, and only one: bar and kitchen staff have reported hearing a woman's voice calling out in greeting late at night, and think it is hers. The earliest printed version this page can date is from the winter of 1999.

The Cloisters is what happens when a Victorian heiress with a private income, a Quaker conscience and no architectural training decides to build the room she has seen in a dream. Annie Jane Lawrence (16 April 1863 – 3 August 1953) was the third child of Alfred Lawrence, who with his brother ran Lawrence Brothers, smiths and founders, in the City of London. Her grandfather William Lawrence had walked to London from Cornwall in 1808 with two guineas and a bag of carpenter's tools and ended up Master of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters; her younger brother was the Labour politician Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, later Baron Pethick-Lawrence, who helped promote the garden city legislation. Annie did social work in the London slums, and it left her convinced that what the poor needed was not charity but fresh air and the habit of thinking. She chose Letchworth because it was the world's first garden city — laid out from 1903 on Ebenezer Howard's blueprint of 1898 — and in 1905 she leased three acres south of the Baldock Road. She commissioned William Harrison Cowlishaw (1869–1957) to build what she had dreamed, and spent £20,000 on it, an enormous sum. What went up is grey brick with diaper patterning and Purbeck stone dressings, an octagonal tower and two open turrets with spiral staircases, and inside, an interior of painted brick with mass concrete vaulting. The heart of it is the Cloisters Garth, a half-oval open-air room with an arcade of Swedish green marble columns. Gifford, writing the centre's own history in 1999, recorded that the marble veining runs deliberately upward to signify growth, and that the two fireplaces are of red-veined marble to signify flame. An Art Nouveau fountain fed a drinking basin above and a hand-washing basin below, and the overflow ran out in two streams across the Garth floor. It opened on the afternoon of Monday 28 January 1907 — the day before, on the Sunday, it had been dedicated. Kenneth Johnson's illustrated record of the town gives the date and the wording: Miss Lawrence dedicated her Adult Open Air School. Adult, not children's: twenty residential students studying, in the school's own formula, "how thought affects action and what causes and produces thought", along with Arts and Crafts skills. At night they slept in beds hung from the vaulting around the open Garth, with tarpaulins pulled across the arches in bad weather and the fireplaces lit in winter. A. Stuart Gray's biographical dictionary of Edwardian architects files it simply as a summer college. The original scheme did not finish. The statutory listing is blunt about it: the rich symbolic carving — the doves and the bats — was "mostly uncompleted before the building project in its original form came to a halt in 1907". Residential summer schools ran only until about 1911, under the Rev. J. Bruce Wallace as resident warden, and the building turned into something else: the base of the Alpha Union, a meeting place for a small Theosophical community, and above all a concert hall. Lawrence, who was profoundly deaf and used an ear trumpet, filled it with music. An organ stood in the entrance hall and a system of pipes carried its sound around the building so that it seemed to come from nowhere. Audiences of a thousand came; on one occasion she hired the London Concert Orchestra, forty unemployed musicians, to play in the Garth. The Garth itself was eventually roofed over with a rotunda to serve as a concert hall, and the building also did a stint as a preparatory school. The last concert was given by the Brotherhood Orchestra in 1939, on the day war broke out. In 1940 the War Department requisitioned it for the Army. It came back six years later so badly used that more than £2,500 was claimed in compensation and the organ was damaged beyond economical repair; for a while the British Tabulating Machine Company used it as a store. Lawrence offered it free to the County Council, with an annuity of £1,000 and the income from £20,000 after her death, and was turned down; other bodies refused it too. A chance remark by her solicitor, Mr T. Bainbridge, sent her to the Freemasons. They accepted the building on 22 May 1948, spent some £3,500 making it usable, and held the first Lodge meeting in October 1951. Lawrence had moved into St Catherine's Nursing Home in 1948 and died there on 3 August 1953, aged ninety. She is buried at All Saints, Willian. The Cloisters was listed Grade II* on 7 September 1979. Until a minor amendment on 26 February 2024 the entry was headed "North Hertfordshire Masonic Lodge (The Cloisters)"; it now reads simply "The Cloisters". It has been on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register since October 2013.

The Cloisters is not a monument you can walk into. It is a working masonic centre and a licensed events venue at Barrington Road, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire SG6 3TH (01462 678059), owned and run by the Lawrence Cloisters Trust. There is no ticket office, no opening hours and no drop-in access, and there are no ghost tours — the owners do not promote the building as haunted at all. There are two honest ways in. The first is the Tea & Tour: a guided walk through the rooms with a dedicated guide, covering what the building was built for, what the Army did to it and what happened next, followed by afternoon tea. It is advertised on the venue's own site and booked through the Trust, and it is the only routine public access to the interior. The second is to hire the place or attend one of its public fundraising events — weddings (the venue seats up to 180), wedding open days, a summer fayre, a Christmas fayre, Burns Night. Masonic meetings themselves are not open to the public. Practical points. There is an on-site car park for about 80 cars with direct step-free access from it into the building, and an accessible toilet. Letchworth Garden City station is the nearest rail connection. The one thing many visitors ask for is not available: the tower and flat roof, with the view over Letchworth, were closed to visitors long ago. Gifford's history explains why — the cost of roof repairs, and severe damage to the tower caused by pigeons. Expect building work. The Cloisters has been on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register since October 2013, originally because failing roof tiles were letting water in, and the Trust still describes it that way. Historic England awarded a repair grant in October 2022. In September 2025 a steeplejack made the crumbling chimney stack safe, and in October 2025 a waterproof membrane was laid over the roof above the Old Upper room. Parts of the building may therefore be scaffolded or closed at short notice; check before travelling. One free thing worth doing: Annie Lawrence's grave is in the churchyard of All Saints at Willian, a village on the southern edge of the garden city and a walk from the building she paid for.