The Charterhouse in Clerkenwell gives you two visits for the price of one, and the first of them is free. The chapel, the museum display and the shop cost nothing, and none of them needs booking; the Tudor rooms behind them are seen only on a guided tour, which is £15 for an hour with a professional guide, or £20 for ninety minutes with one of the residents who lives there.
That is the whole decision, and it is worth understanding before you arrive, because the free part and the paid part are physically separate. Walk in off Charterhouse Square and you get a visitor centre, a room of objects and a chapel. The Great Hall, the medieval cloister, the Great Chamber and the Tudor courtyards sit behind a door that will not open without a ticket.
The site is about seven acres, it has been a plague burial ground, a Carthusian monastery, a Tudor mansion, a boys' school and an almshouse, and it is still the last of those: around forty people aged 60 and over live here. Our guide to Clerkenwell sets it in the district. This page is about getting inside.
The Charterhouse: hours, prices and what each ticket buys
- Free, no booking
- Museum display, chapel and shop, Tuesday to Saturday 10.30am to 4.30pm
- Historic Buildings & Rooms Tour
- £15, £12 concession, 60 minutes, Tuesday to Saturday at 11am and 2.15pm
- Brothers Tour
- £20, £18 concession, up to 90 minutes, Thursdays and Saturdays only
- Concessions
- Disabled visitors, full-time students, over-65s and UK jobseekers; ID may be asked for
- Historic Houses members
- Free on the hour-long tour, on production of a valid card on the day
- Chapel services
- 8am and 5.30pm Monday to Saturday, 10am Sunday, entry through the Gatehouse
- Charterhouse Square
- Free; open from early morning until dusk, Tuesday through Sunday
- Address
- Charterhouse Square, London EC1M 6AN. Farringdon and Barbican stations; buses 4, 56 and 153
There is no child rate, and no rate for anyone under 65 who is not a student. Two adults and two teenagers on the hour-long tour therefore cost £60, unless the teenagers are in full-time education, in which case it is £54. If money is the constraint, the museum display and chapel remain free for everyone, and they are not a token gesture.
What the free half actually contains
The visitor centre, reception, museum display and shop are all reached through the main public entrance on the north side of Charterhouse Square. The entrance is step-free. Nothing here needs to be booked, and you can be in and out in twenty minutes or stay an hour.
The display holds 120 objects, including 35 on loan from Charterhouse School, the London Museum and the V&A, and it was curated in partnership with the London Museum as part of a National Lottery Heritage Fund project. It runs backwards: it starts with the residents' daily life now and works back through the school, Thomas Sutton's charity, the Tudor mansion and the monastery to the Black Death.
The chapel is the other free room, and it is the one to sit in. It stands on the site of the monks' chapter house, with medieval foundations underneath and Jacobean and nineteenth-century work above. This is the room where the Carthusians' refusal to accept Henry VIII as head of the church came to a head; their prior, John Houghton, and several of his monks and lay brothers were sentenced to death.
Charterhouse Square outside costs nothing either, and is open from early morning until dusk, Tuesday through Sunday. It is cobbled, built round a central garden, and one of very few genuinely quiet outdoor places within ten minutes of the City.
Photo: Paul the Archivist · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
Two tours, and which one to book
The Historic Buildings & Rooms Tour is the standard one: £15, £12 concession, sixty minutes, led by a professional guide, twice a day from Tuesday to Saturday at 11am and 2.15pm. It covers the remains of the monastery, the Tudor interiors and the courtyards, and it includes the Great Hall where the residents still eat together.
The Brothers Tour is £20, £18 concession, up to ninety minutes, and runs only on Thursdays and Saturdays. It is led by one of the residents. The Charterhouse is honest about what that means: the tour is given from that person's own point of view, so no two are the same, and you are being shown round somebody's home by somebody who lives in it.
We would pay the extra £5. The buildings are remarkable but they are not unique in London; a Tudor great chamber exists elsewhere. A man in his seventies explaining why he applied to live in a seventeenth-century charitable foundation, and what the community rules are, does not. Book the hour-long tour instead if your time is tight, if you are visiting with teenagers who will lose patience at ninety minutes, or if Thursday and Saturday do not fit your trip.
Both are booked online in advance through the Charterhouse's own ticketing pages. Tours go indoors and outdoors, so the weather matters. Groups of ten or more use a separate booking form.
The Brothers Tour exists on only two days of the week. Thursday and Saturday are the days a resident guides; the rest of the week you get the professional-guide version. If the Brothers Tour is the reason you are coming, build the rest of your Clerkenwell day around one of those two mornings rather than hoping to swap later.
The rooms the tour reaches
Four spaces do most of the work, and knowing what to look for in each one roughly doubles what you get out of an hour.
| Room | Date | What to look for |
|---|---|---|
| Wash-house Court | 1531 | The oldest complete building on the site, in continuous use ever since. The letters "IH" are picked out in the brickwork, thought to stand either for Prior John Houghton or for the Christogram IHS. It still houses residents, and their launderette |
| Master's Court | 1545 | Sir Edward North turned the monastery into a private house using the monastery's own stone. Carved stone and windows from the Carthusian church were built into the outside of the Great Hall |
| The Great Hall | 1571 and 1614 | The residents have eaten here together since 1614, and still do. The carved wooden screen was commissioned by the 4th Duke of Norfolk in 1571; the stone chimney piece is dated 1614 and commemorates Thomas Sutton. Restored after a fire in the Blitz |
| The Great Chamber | 1540s | Green silk walls, portraits of the Restoration governors, a plasterwork ceiling of about 1570 and the painted royal arms of Charles I. Elizabeth I held her first Privy Council in this room before her coronation and signed letters "from the Royal Palace"; James I also held court here |
The Norfolk Cloister is the other thing to see, and the smallest detail in it is the best one. The cloister goes back to the Carthusian monastery of 1371, and there were originally twenty-five monks' cells opening off it. One doorway survives, known as Cell B. The vaulted red brick ceiling above it is the Duke of Norfolk's sixteenth-century work, and he had "ANNO 1571" added to the outside wall to record when his garden gallery was finished. Victorian schoolboys later used the cloister to play a form of football.
Look at the window panes in the Great Chamber as well. Edward Blore's west window of 1840 still carries nineteenth-century schoolboy graffiti scratched into the leaded glass.
Who the Brothers are
The residents are called Brothers, and the word needs explaining because it misleads. It is not religious and, since 2017, it is not male either: the title survives from Thomas Sutton's foundation, where the beneficiaries were the "Poor Brothers" of the Charterhouse, and it now applies to women as well.
Sutton, one of the wealthiest commoners in Jacobean England, bought the site and founded the charity in 1611. His plan provided for up to eighty men who had served their country well and for the education of forty boys from poor backgrounds. The charity was formally established by the Charterhouse Act of 1627 and is still legally called Sutton's Hospital in Charterhouse. The school moved out to Godalming in 1872; the almshouse never left.
Today the charity houses around forty people aged 60 or over who have a housing, financial and social need and want to live independently within a community, with a care team on hand. Nobody has to be Anglican or to attend chapel. The Brothers still eat together every day in the sixteenth-century Great Hall.
The Charterhouse opened to visitors only in 2017, with National Lottery Heritage Fund support, and it says plainly that ticket, shop and donation income goes towards maintaining the buildings. That is a reasonable thing to know when you are deciding between the £15 tour and the free rooms.
Candlelight, gardens and the other ways in
Beyond the two standard tours the Charterhouse runs a seasonal programme, and some of it reaches parts of the site the daytime tours do not.
- The Charterhouse by Candlelight runs in late autumn and winter, with published prices in the region of £27 to £30.
- Garden tours run in spring, summer and early autumn, led by the horticulture team. The courtyard gardens — Chapel Court, the Norfolk Garden, Preacher's Court and the Master's Garden — are otherwise behind walls.
- A British Sign Language tour led by a Deaf BSL guide is offered for Deaf visitors.
- Lectures and concerts happen through the year, including an annual Thomas Sutton Lecture in the autumn and carol concerts in December.
- The Community Space opens on Friday mornings from 10am to 12pm.
The cheapest way in of all is a chapel service: 8am and 5.30pm from Monday to Saturday, 10am on Sunday, with entry by the Gatehouse. Each one is brief, open to anybody and costs nothing. Our list of free things to do in London has more in this vein, and the Open House Festival in September opens other buildings that are normally shut.
Forty people live here, and the rules about cameras exist because of that. Personal photography is allowed across the site, but tripods, monopods, selfie sticks and lighting equipment are not, and you must not photograph residents or other visitors without asking. Treat the courtyards as you would a neighbour's front garden rather than a museum gallery.
Access, and what to expect on the day
The visitor centre entrance is step-free, so the museum display and shop are reachable by wheelchair. The tours are a different matter: they take in a Tudor building with courtyards, thresholds and uneven ground, and the Charterhouse publishes a separate facilities and access guide that is worth reading before you book. If anything is uncertain, the visitor engagement team answers the phone on 020 3818 8873.
Opening times can change at short notice for private events, and the Charterhouse says it announces those on its own homepage and social media rather than anywhere else. A free visit is a small loss if it falls through; a booked tour is not, so check the day before.
Fitting it into a Clerkenwell morning
Allow ninety minutes for the free rooms plus the hour-long tour, or two hours with the Brothers Tour. That leaves most of a morning, and everything worth adding is within ten minutes' walk.
Straight across West Smithfield is St Bartholomew the Great, founded in 1123 and now free to enter. Five minutes west, the Museum of the Order of St John occupies another Tudor gatehouse and follows the same free-museum, paid-tour pattern, which makes the two a natural pair. Ely Place and St Etheldreda's are about ten minutes south-west.
From 28 November 2026 the area changes: the London Museum opens in the Smithfield General Market building a two-minute walk away, with free galleries, which will make this one of the densest clusters of free history in London. The Barbican Centre is ten minutes east, and the Roman remains in our guide to what survives of Roman London start a little beyond it.
For lunch, several of the taverns in our guide to historic pubs in London are on the route. Farringdon, served by the Elizabeth line as well as Thameslink and four Underground lines, is the easiest arrival point; Barbican is about the same distance. If you are planning around limited walking, our guide to London for older visitors covers pacing and seating across the city.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Charterhouse free to visit?
Partly. The chapel, museum display and shop are free, with no booking, from 10.30am to 4.30pm, Tuesday through Saturday, and Charterhouse Square outside is free as well. The Great Hall, Great Chamber, cloister and Tudor courtyards can only be seen on a paid guided tour.
How much is a tour of the Charterhouse?
The hour-long Historic Buildings and Rooms Tour is £15, or £12 for concessions, and runs Tuesday to Saturday at 11am and 2.15pm. The ninety-minute Brothers Tour, led by a resident, is £20 or £18 concession and runs on Thursdays and Saturdays. Historic Houses members go free on the hour-long tour.
Who lives at the Charterhouse today?
Around forty people aged 60 and over, known as Brothers, live in the almshouse. They are people with a housing, financial and social need who want to live independently within a community. Since 2017 women have been included, and residents are not required to hold any religious belief.
Can you go into the Charterhouse chapel without a ticket?
Yes. The chapel is part of the free visit during public opening hours, and anybody attending a service may go in as well: 8am and 5.30pm from Monday to Saturday, 10am on Sunday, using the Gatehouse entrance. The services are brief and cost nothing.
How long does a visit to the Charterhouse take?
Allow about ninety minutes in total for the free rooms and the hour-long tour, or roughly two hours if you take the Brothers Tour instead. The free museum display and chapel on their own can be done in twenty to forty minutes.
Sources
- The Charterhouse - Plan Your Visit: opening hours, tours, access and travel (checked September 2026)
- The Charterhouse - Historic Buildings & Rooms Tour tickets and prices (checked September 2026)
- The Charterhouse - Brothers Tour tickets and prices (checked September 2026)
- The Charterhouse - Historic Buildings and Rooms (checked September 2026)
- The Charterhouse - The almshouse and the Brothers (checked September 2026)
- The Charterhouse - Frequently asked questions (checked September 2026)
- The Charterhouse - Museum display (checked September 2026)