This is about a home: Downside Abbey in Somerset, England, which is home to a community of Catholic monks who derive their pattern of life ultimately from the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict. What I want to explore here is the active role of buildings in Benedictine life, and the crucial part that architecture plays in building up an English Benedictine identity. The monastery is a practical architecture for living – praying, eating, working, studying, sleeping – as well as a visible site of witness to the world. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, I will first attempt to describe the role that architecture plays in the monks’ lives and will then introduce the idea that monastic architecture might productively be treated as ‘counterfactual architecture’ – that is, architecture that raises ‘what if?’ questions about history and social life.

Benedictine monks are men whose life cycles become wrapped around a particular place, a set of buildings that shape their daily routine. To offer some context, I will begin by describing an event that is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: the monastic community gathers around the altar, as they do every day, for the conventual (communal) celebration of Mass. To return to the same places day after day, week after week, year after year – this is the monk's pattern of life. To repeat the same gestures, the same words, in the same locations. This is a life shaped by the call to prayer, the continual, steady striking of ‘Great Bede’ from the Abbey's square tower calling you again and again toward the place of worship. The monks take up their places towards the east of the church in the part of the church known as the Choir; the monastic community's presence in the space is marked by the elaborately carved choir stalls even when the monks themselves are absent. The lay congregation that come from outside the monastery to join in the monks’ worship are seated in the Nave, the body of the church to the west.

It is in the context of this regular pattern of worship that a major lifeevent occurs.