Now with paint peeling from its walls and shutters, and loose plaster and threadbare curtains, Old Monks Farmhouse in Lancing, West Sussex, must once have been a charming building. Grade-II listed, it was registered as a chapel in 1954 and extended for a larger congregation in 1959. It later became the presbytery when the neighbouring red-brick Church of the Holy Family was consecrated in 1972. Its former lives will be deeply disguised due to its impending likely conversion into seven flats.
One of them is an important literary association that dates to the days of the farmhouse, for here, in the early hours of March 20, 1945, died the 74-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, best known as “Bosie”, the one-time lover of Oscar Wilde.
