Reading has got its abbey back, almost 10 years after the gates to the ruined medieval church were locked when large stones began to fall from the walls with ominously increasing frequency.

However, the remains of Henry I, who founded the abbey in 1121 and is believed to be buried there, have yet again escaped discovery.

“Was Henry I buried here? Absolutely, definitely, yes,” says Matthew Williams, manager of Reading museum, which has led the £3.15m conservation project. “He wasn’t going to spend the equivalent of half a billion pounds on his church and then miss being buried here. We just don’t know whether he is still here.”

Henry I died in France in 1135 – from gorging on “a surfeit of lampreys”, according to his physician – and was stitched into a bull’s hide to be brought back to England for burial. If he was interred in his own richly endowed abbey, one of the grandest of its kind in northern Europe – longer than Westminster Abbey, larger than Durham cathedral – he would almost certainly have been laid in a tomb in front of the high altar.

Henry I, the fourth son of William the Conqueror , ruled England from 1100 to his death in 1135.

On one of the coldest days of last winter, there was a moment of high excitement when Ben Lawson, of CRL Restoration, got a call from a colleague working at the ruins. “Ben, Ben, we think we’ve found him!” said the caller, who had uncovered a large rectangular slab of stone in what was the king’s own chapel.

The stone proved to be an altar slab, a rare survival of the wholesale recycling of good quality cut stone from the site after the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, when the last abbot of Reading was hung, drawn and quartered outside the great west door of his own church. Prayers for Henry’s soul would certainly have been said at the altar at daily masses for centuries after his death. But it was not the king’s grave.



The abbey ruins are flanked by the high redbrick wall of the famous Reading Gaol, now closed and awaiting redevelopment. Archaeological work continues under what was Oscar Wilde’s cell window, in the prison yard that covers much of the remains of the abbey buildings and burial sites.

However, it is probable that if Henry’s body did survive the destruction of his abbey it could lie under a more modern construction. Not a car park, as in the discovered resting place of Richard III, but more likely a small Victorian school building that now is used as a day nursery. A badly eroded stone memorial plaque installed in 1921 and refurbished as part of the conservation work, hedges its bets by saying Henry lies “near this spot”.

The conservation work has included a restoration of the gatehouse that once led to the abbot’s lodgings. These became a schoolroom where, in 1785, the pupils included a little girl called Jane Austen. Most of the gate collapsed in the 19th century just as the money was raised to restore it, and it was rebuilt under Sir George Gilbert Scott. In the 21st century it became so precarious the arch was propped with scaffolding and the building sat empty for years. But it will now become the museum’s recreated Victorian schoolroom, used by hundreds of school visits every year.



Most of the remaining abbey itself still lies under later buildings. The open space within the towering ruins was a public park, used for open-air plays and office workers’ sandwich breaks. It was only when volunteers began to collect all the fallen stones that it became clear just how precarious the walls had become, their rubble cores having been exposed by the removal of the facing cut stone. The walls have been stabilised, rebuilt in places, and capped with a layer of turf and sedum to help stop water seeping into the structure.



Reading Abbey reopens to the public on 16 June, from dawn to dusk, and there will be regular plays, music and film evening events.

The restoration team is now waiting to hear what the Ministry of Justice plans to do with the old prison complex, which attracted visitors from all over the world when Artangel used it as an exhibition and reading space in 2016. “It’s the obvious next step,” said Williams. “It’s got to be part of the story.”



