Thomas Sutton's Foundation
Charterhouse was founded in 1611 by Thomas Sutton, an Elizabethan entrepreneur who made his fortune from coal mining in County Durham and lending money at a rate that made even his contemporaries raise an eyebrow. When he died later that year, he left £300,000 – an astronomical sum – to establish a hospital for elderly men and a school for boys on the site of a former Carthusian monastery in Smithfield, London. The school that bears the monastery's name has been educating pupils ever since.
Charterhouse remained in London for 260 years. By the mid-19th century, the Smithfield site was cramped and hemmed in by the expanding city. Under headmaster William Haig Brown, the school moved in 1872 to a new 250-acre hilltop campus on the outskirts of Godalming, designed by Philip Charles Hardwick. The main buildings – Founder's Court, the chapel, and the great hall – are Victorian Gothic in Surrey stone, arranged around cloisters that echo the monastic origins.
The School Today
Charterhouse went fully co-educational in September 2021, welcoming girls into Year 9 for the first time. The change completed a transition that had begun with girls entering the sixth form in 1971. Around 1,000 pupils now attend, the majority as boarders. The school is one of the original nine English public schools defined by the Clarendon Commission in 1864, alongside Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and five others.
Academically, Charterhouse sits comfortably in the upper tier. The music programme is particularly strong – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Ralph Vaughan Williams was a pupil here in the 1890s and later credited the school's music master with sparking his interest in composition. Art and drama are equally well-resourced, with a purpose-built arts centre and a 300-seat theatre.
Notable Old Carthusians
The alumni list is long and eclectic. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement, was a pupil in the 1870s. William Makepeace Thackeray studied here and used the school as a model in The Newcomes. Peter Gabriel, Max Hastings, Robert Graves, and David Dimbleby all passed through. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was educated at the London site in the 1710s. The original Charterhouse in Smithfield still stands and is open to the public – a rare surviving fragment of Tudor London.
