Charterhouse Bell Tower

The Building & Maintenance team were proud to return the Charter House bell tower in Hull to its former glory and picked up a Hull Civic Society Good Mark Award. The £60,000 project to replace the Charter House bell tower was praised for ‘maintaining the high level of craftsmanship skills necessary for the reconstruction of the cupola’.

The project also produced a piece of history as we were presented with a copy of the invoice for one of Houlton’s very early projects on the site. The figures might have changed since the invoice was issued all the way back in 1887 but Houlton’s approach to quality and delivery certainly hasn’t.

The building is Grade: I listed (from 1952)  and is brick with painted ashlar dressings and hipped slate roofs topped with a large wooden cupola with six Ionic columns and lead dome which contains the Charterhouse bell.

The Charterhouse was a Carthusian monastery and Almshouse in Hull, built just outside the town's city walls. The hospital building survived the dissolution of the monasteries but the priory was destroyed in 1538. The structure of the hospital was destroyed prior to the first siege of Hull during the English civil war. A replacement was built in 1645, which was replaced again in 1778-80 by Joseph Hargrave; the buildings function as an almshouse with an attached chapel, and remain in use to the present day.