Qualla: Ealing Abbey

Ealing Abbey: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Salmon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Castlebar Hill rises gently in west London, where the city begins to thin into suburbs. In 1897 a small group of Benedictine monks from Downside Abbey in Somerset arrived to found a parish there. They had no church, no monastery, only a plot of ground and the assignment from the Archdiocese of Westminster. By 1899 two or three bays of a new nave were open. By 1915 the sanctuary and Lady Chapel were complete. The building was the architect Frederick Walters's design, a long hammerbeam nave painted with the monograms IHC and SB. In 1955 Pope Pius XII raised the priory to the rank of abbey, the only Benedictine abbey in London. Its history is one of patient construction, bomb damage, careful restoration, and one of the most serious institutional failures in modern English monasticism.

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Image: John Salmon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ealing Abbey: The Long Build

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Salmon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Frederick Walters designed the Abbey Church in the Gothic Revival style. Construction was incremental, decade by decade, as funds and patience allowed. The west end and four western bays were completed by 1934 under Walters's son Edward John, finishing what the father had begun. ...

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Image: John Salmon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ealing Abbey: Two Bombs in 1940

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Salmon, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1940 the church was struck twice by German bombs during the Blitz. The first destroyed the organ chamber and the War Memorial Chapel, where the names of First World War dead had been carved. The second hit the east end, taking out the sanctuary and choir. Only two stained glas...

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Image: John Salmon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ealing Abbey: John Main and Christian Meditation

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Salmon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Among the monks who lived at Ealing was John Main, who arrived in 1959. Main had previously served in the British Colonial Service in Malaya, where he encountered a Hindu swami who taught him a form of mantra meditation. The practice troubled him as a Catholic, but years later, a...

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Image: John Salmon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ealing Abbey: Reckoning

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert-brook, CC0. A major work of the Abbey has been the teaching and administration of St Benedict's School, founded as Ealing Priory School in 1902. That work brought the Abbey into one of the most serious reckonings of the modern English Catholic Church. In November 2008 Father David Pearce was...

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Image: Robert-brook | CC0

Ealing Abbey: The Institute and the Plainchant Choir

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doyle of London, CC BY-SA 4.0. Out of the catastrophe came governance reform. Abbot Shipperlee commissioned Lord Carlile of Berriew to report on the school's structure; an Independent Schools Inspectorate report in 2013 found the new pastoral care to be excellent. In February 2019 Abbot Shipperlee resigned ove...

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Image: Doyle of London | CC BY-SA 4.0