A Private View: the storied medieval palace on the brink of a new beginning in rural Kent

A tired swimmer in the waves of time
I throw my hands up: let the surface close:
Sink down through centuries to another clime,
And buried find the castle and the rose. 

– Vita Sackville-West, ‘Sissinghurst’

The village of Charing in Kent takes its name from the Old English ‘cyrran’, a word that usually means ‘to turn’ or ‘to bend’, but which carries a range of secondary associations: ‘to churn thoughts’, ‘to convert’, ‘to change’, and ‘to transform’. 

In one way or another, each of these meanings applies to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Palace at Charing, a remarkable complex of buildings located on a bend on one of Kent’s ancient routeways. Dropping down from the ridge of the North Downs into the flatter land of the Weald, the road from London forks at Charing, heading in one direction towards the Roman harbour at Lympne and the other to the seat of the archbishops at Canterbury.  

In terms of its pedigree, the palace’s closest relatives are some of England’s great medieval buildings, such as the King’s Manor in York or the The Archbishops’ Palace in Maidstone. As for its atmosphere, a nearer relation is the romantic ruin of  Sissinghurst Castle on the other side of the Weald, the fragmentary remains of an Elizabethan great house acquired by Vita Sackville-West in 1930 and lovingly coaxed back to life. 

The whole complex is Grade I-listed and a scheduled monument, a level of protection that reflects its status as one of England’s most important historic sites. Its air of faded splendour is poignantly evoked in a series of watercolours by the architect Christopher Williams, painted during a recent visit

The palace is currently in the hands of the Spitalfields Trust, a charity that saves and repairs buildings of historical merit, matching them with new owners. Teetering on a knife-edge between preservation and decay, the Archbishop’s Palace at Charing has a potent combination of historical gravitas, semi-ruinous allure and an open-ended future.

Late-medieval Charing was the final stop on one of the pilgrim routes from London to Canterbury. With its maze of lodgings, great hall, and outbuildings, the palace served as a waystation for travelling archbishops and royalty. Nowadays, it’s more often approached from London Victoria or King’s Cross St Pancras. As the train makes its way out of the city, mid-rise buildings with bikes on balconies give way to suburbs and thereafter to lush and inviting countryside. Walking up the hill from Charing station, half-timbered houses lean gently into a high street that still has a butcher and a characterful General Stores. 

To read the guidebooks and scholarship on the Archbishop’s Palace is to enter a thicket of architectural minutiae. The main buildings enclose an open space, loosely a courtyard, that is now thick with herb robert, sweet cicely and fennel. Opposite the gatehouse is a worn but habitable farmhouse, formerly the private chambers of the archbishop and today the home of a friendly custodian. 

The lower levels of the house are built from a mix of knapped flint, Kentish rag and the odd fragment of Caen stone. The upper storeys, the work of the 15th-century Archbishop Morton, are of slim red brick with stone quoins at the corners. A passage, currently obscured by a tired portacabin, links the house to the great hall, a vast space that was once the scene of lavish feasting. Interspersed with these major buildings are a bewildering array of dormitories, stables, entrances, and garderobes (toilet blocks), all the rooms needed for a great clerical household.

There are architectural marvels everywhere. The chamber block features a cushioned capital from the 12th century and diapered brickwork (black diamond patterns) akin to Morton’s gatehouse at Lambeth Palace. On the top floor, approached by a spiral oak staircase, are a fine set of apartments with hexafoils scratched into the plaster to ward off evil spirits. Stone corbels project from the walls of the hall, where they once supported a grand timber roof. In the garden are the remains of a chapel used for private prayer by generations of archbishops.

Even more powerful than this detail is the palace’s general atmosphere – its sense of fragmented romance. Originally situated on the main road through the village, the medieval archbishops petitioned the king to divert the highway. Thanks to their efforts, the palace is now on a side street that terminates at the neighbouring parish church. Standing in the central courtyard, there’s a kind of luminous silence that seems impossible in a village this close to London. From the back of the main house, the view opens onto the North Downs, pale and chalky in the thin Kentish light. Looking through the front door, the gatehouse frames Cleward’s meadow, once a busy marketplace, now a forgotten village green. 

The Archbishop’s Palace began to decline almost immediately after the most vigorous phase of construction in the late 15th century. A huge part of the palace’s charm stems from its subsequent centuries as a working farm. The earliest of these farmer occupants had pretensions of grandeur, inserting a 17th-century staircase from a bigger house into the chamber block. 

After that, a rhythm of rather mundane, low-status rural life seems to have set in. At the end of the 18th century, great openings were torn into the sides of the hall and an oasthouse built within. This still stands, with its intriguing conical kiln and machinery for pressing and bagging up hops. The farmhouse has a modest kitchen with a range and fading 19th-century wallpaper featuring a repeat of coffee pots and household crockery. Everywhere there are cast offs from farming life: forks stuffed in fireplaces, broken ladders, stones worn by animals. At some point, the upper apartments, where Archbishop Morton once warmed himself by the stately fireplace, began to be used as a chicken coop. Though somewhat neglected, the palace’s period as a farm inadvertently saved it from the more damaging ‘improvements’ that might have been made had it passed into more illustrious hands. 

Casting an eye back over the long history of the Archbishop’s Palace, a pattern begins to form of a building that has inhaled and exhaled over time, with moments of frenzied activity followed by long periods of dormancy. The high points are very high indeed. Thomas Becket is known to have used Charing and Henry VIII overnighted there on his way to Dover and the Field of the Cloth of Gold. A document from 1348 recording expenses incurred during a two-day visit by Archbishop Stratford gives a glimpse of just how lavish these visits must have been. 

According to Stratford’s register, payments were made for the care of 80 horses, and wages dispersed for a baker, four chapel servants, 15 pages, and 58 helpers. Since it was Lent, the food was modest and mainly marine in nature: 600 herring, a salted salmon, a sturgeon, cod, pike, eels, bream, and trout. All this was to be washed down by 15 gallons of wine and 160 gallons of beer. Only one guest was invited, the abbot of Faversham, and the archbishop didn’t visit again that year. 

The Archbishop’s Palace at Charing is once again poised on the brink of a new phase of life. It is a property with many possible futures: some sort of public space or gallery, an artist’s studio, a workshop, a commune, or a private dwelling. Among the more alluring of these options is the Sissinghurst model. Just as Vita Sackville-West did at Sissinghurst, the palace could be occupied with a minimum amount of work and teased back to life gradually. Like Sissinghurst, what this remarkable building needs is someone willing to sink deep into its waters and dwell in its mysteries.  

Further reading

Sarah Pearson’s The Archbishop’s Palace at Charing in the Middle Ages

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