The Cloisters

The story

The Cloisters stands in Letchworth Garden City, in Hertfordshire, and few buildings in the town have a more unusual origin. It was the creation of Annie Jane Lawrence (1863-1953), a Quaker philanthropist, who leased about three acres of land in the new garden city and said that the design for her building had come to her in a dream.

To turn the dream into stone she engaged the Arts and Crafts architect William Harrison Cowlishaw. Work started in 1905 and the building opened on 17 January 1907, at a cost of about £20,000. (Wikipedia's introduction gives 1905 as the build date; the Historic England listing describes it as built in 1906-07, so the safest summary is 1905-1907.)

The Cloisters was conceived as an open-air school. It housed a residential "School of Psychology" for around twenty students, who were taught Arts and Crafts skills alongside lectures, concerts and drama. The community leaned toward Theosophy and hosted summer schools of the Alpha Union. Lawrence herself lived next door, in Cloisters Lodge. Her final concert at The Cloisters took place in 1939, on the very day the Second World War broke out.

The war ended that chapter. The Army requisitioned the building and left it damaged, and by 1948 Lawrence was struggling to keep it up and pay for repairs. She first offered it to the local council, which declined, and then to the Freemasons of Hertfordshire, who accepted. It became the North Hertfordshire Masonic Centre; Historic England records Masonic use by 1948, while Wikipedia dates the Masonic center to 1951, the year a new lodge, Cloisters Lodge No. 7100, was founded to commemorate her gift. Lawrence later moved to a house elsewhere in Letchworth and then, as she grew frail, to a nursing home, and died there, aged 90, on 3 August 1953. Her grave lies at All Saints Church in the nearby village of Willian.

The legend

The Cloisters' reputation as a haunted building rests on a single, modest anecdote. People working late in the building, bar and kitchen staff among them, have reported hearing a woman's voice calling out a greeting when no one else was there. From this grew the idea that the founder, Annie Lawrence, has never quite left the building she dreamed into being and gave away in her old age.

That is the whole of the story as far as published sources go. The only report we could trace appears in an article by Jack Gifford in the Freemasons' magazine Freemasonry Today (issue 11, winter 1999/2000), which Wikipedia cites; we have not seen the article itself. No apparition is described, no witness is named, and no paranormal investigation, television program or book chapter about a haunting has been found. The building's appearance on television, in ITV's Britain's Secret Homes in 2013, was about its architecture and history, not ghosts.

It is worth reading the claim in proportion. A friendly disembodied greeting heard late at night in a large building used for functions is a gentle kind of ghost story, and attaching it to the founder who said she had dreamed the building is a natural step. There is nothing here to confirm or to debunk, only a piece of staff lore that has made its way into lists of haunted places.

What remains today

Cowlishaw's building still stands and is protected. It was listed Grade II* on 7 September 1979, and Letchworth Garden City Corporation counts it among the great historic buildings of North Hertfordshire. ITV's Britain's Secret Homes, a five-part series shown in June 2013, featured it in its fourth episode and ranked it 16th of 50 historic buildings chosen by English Heritage.

That same year it was added to English Heritage's Heritage at Risk Register. The structure was sound, but the poor state of the roof tiles was letting water in and causing damage. The building remains in Masonic use: around sixty lodges and related Masonic orders meet there, and an elected trust, the Lawrence Cloisters Trust, looks after the building; its name keeps the founder's memory alive.

Visiting

The Cloisters is an active Masonic center, not a museum, and there is no regular public access and no ghost tour. Entry is generally limited to Masonic meetings, private functions and occasional open days; we could not verify current arrangements. Please do not try to enter the building or its grounds outside an organized event.

Be careful when searching online: the old official website address listed in some directories now leads to an unrelated online casino page and should not be trusted. The exterior can be appreciated from public streets in Letchworth. Annie Lawrence's grave is in the churchyard of All Saints, Willian; if you visit, treat it as the resting place it is.

Sources

1. Historic England list entry (List entry 1102019) — Historic England · Open Government Licence
2. Wikimedia Commons category : The Cloisters, Letchworth — Wikimedia Commons
3. The Cloisters, Letchworth: Ansicht (aus: Skizzen- und Fotoalbum 26) — Museum of Architecture at Berlin Institute of Technology via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
4. The Cloisters, Letchworth: Grundriss, Details (aus: Skizzen- und Fotoalbum 26) — Museum of Architecture at Berlin Institute of Technology via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
5. "The Cloisters, Letchworth" (Historic England list entry 1102019) — British Listed Buildings — British Listed Buildings
6. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.