Tyburn Convent: The Nuns Who Never Leave

You are standing in front of one of London's most extraordinary hidden stories. This modest brick building at number eight Hyde Park Place is Tyburn Convent... and behind these walls, right now, at this very moment, a nun is on her knees in prayer. She has been there for hours.

London · from the walk “The People's Park: Secrets & Untold Stories of Hyde Park”

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Tyburn Convent, 8 Hyde Park Place, London W2 2LJ

You are standing in front of one of London's most extraordinary hidden stories. This modest brick building at number eight Hyde Park Place is Tyburn Convent... and behind these walls, right now, at this very moment, a nun is on her knees in prayer. She has been there for hours. And when she rises, another will silently take her place. This has not stopped... for over a hundred and twenty years.

But to understand Why, we need to go back much further. Tyburn field, near the present Marble Arch, was a place of public execution from eleven ninety-six to seventeen eighty-three. In fifteen seventy-one, a permanent triangular frame was erected here... a mammoth structure that could hang up to twenty-four people at a time. They called it the Tyburn Tree. Not a tree at all, but a three-legged gallows shaped like a giant triangle.

English law made it an act of treason to refuse to assent to the royal supremacy over the Church claimed by Henry the Eighth, or to be, or even to Harbour, a Catholic priest. The standard penalty was execution by being hanged, drawn and quartered. The first martyrs at Tyburn were Saint John Houghton and his companions, executed on May the fourth, fifteen thirty-five. The last was Saint Oliver Plunkett on July the first, sixteen eighty-one. One hundred and five Catholics died here for their faith across nearly a hundred and fifty years.

Now here is a detail most people walk right past. In fifteen eighty-five, Father Gregory Gunne, during his own trial, rebuked an Elizabethan court for having sentenced Saint Edmund Campion to death at Tyburn. He made a bold prophecy... that one day, on this very spot where the martyrs died, a religious house would arise. Three hundred and eighteen years later... it happened.

A Frenchwoman, Adèle Garnier, had established a Benedictine community in Montmartre, Paris, in eighteen ninety-eight. But in nineteen oh one, the French legislature passed laws placing severe restrictions on religious bodies, forcing many to leave France. One day, Cardinal Vaughan, archbishop of Westminster, received two letters on the same morning. One from a priest seeking a home for these exiled French nuns. The other from a Catholic lawyer, telling him a house had come on the market at Tyburn. The cardinal held the two letters together and said... let these nuns get this property.

This Benedictine Convent was opened on the fourth of March, nineteen oh three. And the nuns began what they call Perpetual Adoration... someone praying, every hour of every day, without ceasing. This continued unbroken except Once... during the Second World War, when the convent building was bombed and Adoration was temporarily relocated to Wadhurst in Sussex. During the London Blitz, a bomb landed very near the convent. After the all clear sounded, a crew scrambled to find the nun who had been praying. She was injured, but when she regained consciousness, her first words were... is Our Lord all right? The building had sustained terrible damage, but the altar and the monstrance were untouched.

If you look closely at the building's exterior, you will find five separate memorials. And inside, in the crypt, the monastery houses relics from Catholics martyred at Tyburn... linens stained with blood, and a collection of finger bones, vertebrae, hair, and fingernails. Many were carefully collected from Catholic families who had secretly safeguarded them during centuries of persecution.

Take a moment. Listen. Behind these walls, amid the roar of London traffic... silence. And prayer. Just as Father Gunne promised, over four centuries ago.

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