Invented by the Greeks to give shelter from the sun, elevated to ecclesiastical excellence in the Middle Ages, cloisters are a path between worlds mental and physical, says Harry Mount

I literally had a cloistered youth. Four times a week at 8.59am, from the ages of 13 to 16, I sprinted through the cloisters of Westminster Abbey to the 9am morning service at Westminster School. If I was a minute late, the towering Abbey doors slammed shut and it was SEP – the dreaded Saturday Evening Punishment, with a 10-minute run around Dean’s Yard.

Then, for another four years at Magdalen College, Oxford, I walked round its enchanting cloisters every day. In my last year, I lived in those cloisters, climbing up the stairs to my bedroom, high up in the cloisters roof, overlooking Addison’s Walk, where Joseph Addison (1672–1719), a Magdalen don and founder of the Spectator, used to hammer out his thoughts while strolling. As St Augustine of Hippo was fond of saying, “Solvitur ambulando” – “It is solved by walking.”

With the arrogance of youth, I took those cloisters for granted and never thought why they were there. But even without me thinking about them they had their intended effect on me: as places for thinking, talking and slow walking (perfect for idlers), and for connecting halls, libraries, chapels and churches to each other – and to my charming little attic room.

The origins of cloisters lie in the stoas of ancient Greece. A stoa was a covered walkway – in a straight line, rather than in the square of later cloisters. They were often on two floors and open on one side – in Greece, you were usually sheltering from the sun, rather than the northern European rain. The breeze through the open, usually Doric colonnade, acted as ancient air conditioning.

A bit like a shopping mall, these colonnades would often back on to offices or shops, providing a shaded buffer zone against the heat outside your front door. If you’re ever in the agora in Athens on a blistering hot day, you might find yourself taking shelter in the Stoa of Attalos – built by King Attalos II of Pergman in the mid-second century BC. The stoa that shelters you there today was in fact rebuilt in 1956 by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

The Greeks, like St Augustine, loved to walk and talk. Two major philosophical schools took their name from the practice. The Peripatetics, founded by Aristotle in 335 BC in Athens’s Lyceum, got their name from the Greek peripatetikos – “walking”. Aristotle was said to have lectured to his pupils while walking along the peripatoi – the covered walkways of the Lyceum, not far from the Greek Parliament today.

The Stoics – subject of Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson’s latest masterpiece, How to Live Like a Stoic: A Handbook for Happiness – took their name from those stoas. Zeno of Citium started teaching Stoicism in 300 BC in the Stoa Poikile – a painted arcade – in the Athenian agora. Stoics strolled up and down the stoa while teaching, or took a breather on sheltered benches, just like the dehydrated tourists today.

The agora was crammed with buildings. The stoas nestled right up against altars and temples. But they rarely connected to those other buildings. In other words, they were self-contained – designed for walking back and forth; walking to think, rather than walking to get somewhere specific.

It was the Romans who really invented the cloister, as we know it.  The word “cloister” comes from the Latin claustrum – “enclosure”. Instead of that long line of the stoa, the Roman claustrum was a peristyle court – or central courtyard – in a villa. Several survive in Pompeii today. These provided a light, airy, shaded spot in Roman houses, baking in summertime.

The first Christian basilicas grew out of the Roman temple plan. Visit the Mithraeum in the City of London – that staggering third century AD survival, a temple to the Persian god Mithras – and its outline is reminiscent of later churches: nave, aisles, with a curved chancel.

Connect one of those Roman courtyards to an early Christian church and – hey presto! – the ecclesiastical cloister is born. Cloisters are invariably on the south side of a church or cathedral; or abbey – my morning runs at school were arrow-straight into the south flank of Westminster Abbey.

The south side is warmer, facing the sun – crucial in a mighty cathedral which casts its northern side into chilly darkness. The south side of a church is also where you’ll find the earliest graves – a place in the sun for all eternity.

There were cloisters in fifth-century AD churches in Syria. In the eighth century, the classic European cloister took off, with church offices and monks’ quarters leading off the cloister.

Ever since then, the format has remained pretty much the same – a square, covered walkway, giving off a church.

But what variety lies within that simple square. Only now do I realise how sophisticated the windows were in that Westminster Abbey cloister I ran through every week like a blind idiot. The Great Cloister, to give it its proper name, is a mixture of Edward the Confessor’s 11th century abbey (including Britain’s oldest door), Henry III’s 13th-century rebuilding and some 14th-century touches after a fire. It makes for one of the great combinations of medieval architecture on the planet: Purbeck marble columns, crocket capitals, and windows inspired by Sainte Chapelle in Paris. No wonder it’s all so grand.

At Westminster the Great Cloister leads to the Chapter House (home to our first Parliament), the library and two more cloisters – the Dark Cloister and the Little Cloister. So Westminster Abbey illustrated the peak of 13th-century cloister-building; and Magdalen the 1500 version.

Magdalen’s cloister is lined with delightful statues – including Moses, and Jacob and the Angel. The only time I noticed them was one night in the Junior Common Room, when an innocent but completely smashed fine artist leant against a statue and it came tumbling to the ground. Good old Magdalen didn’t kick him out – or make him pay thousands for restoration. His remorseful agony at his foolishness was punishment enough.

I woke from the idiotic sleep of philistine youth when I was 33, now the New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. By then, I could appreciate one of the great, underappreciated sights of New York – the medieval cloisters transplanted from France and jammed together into a museum by John D Rockefeller Jr in 1938.

Up in Washington Heights, the Cloisters are rarely visited by tourists. I often had them to myself – a chance to fill in that shameful gap in my education and teach myself about the four Romanesque and Gothic cloisters there – Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont, and Trie-sur-Baïse – from the 12th to the 15th centuries.

It’s an utterly bonkers idea – only made possible by a visionary American gazillionaire – but this strange collision of cloisters works; not least because Rockefeller also bought up land on the other side of the Hudson River in New Jersey. So you look across the water and, for a moment, you think you’re not in New York but in medieval France, surrounded by the Cloisters’ pink Languedoc marble from the Pyrenees. Twenty years after running blindly through Westminster’s 13th-century cloisters, my eyes were finally opened to their rare beauties, in 21st-century Manhattan.

Harry Mount wrote Odyssey: Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus (Bloomsbury Continuum).

This article is from Idler #109 May/June 2026 – out now.

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