On a visit to Somerset I made a long overdue field trip to the various sites where The Abode of Love religious cult was located, 1840s to 1960s.

In Chapter 4 of Inconvenient People I tell the story of how Louisa Nottidge’s mother had her kidnapped and certified into a lunatic asylum near Uxbridge, Middlesex, in 1847. She did this in order to protect Louisa, and her inheritance, from sinister Abode of Love founder Reverend Henry Prince. Louisa and four of her sisters had run away to the Abode of Love and signed over their considerable fortunes to Prince. In despair and panic, Mrs Nottidge misused the lunacy laws to “rescue” Louisa from the Abode and from what was, in her view, an even worse fate than wrongful incarceration.

The Abode of Love (also known as The Agapemone) was a complex of buildings constructed in the early 1840s by Prince and his followers at the hamlet of Four Forks, Spaxton – four miles west of Bridgwater. The black and white drawing below from the Illustrated London News of 1851 shows Prince and some of the chosen few charging out of the main gates to parade their wealth around the narrow muddy lanes of this agricultural community.

The controversial cult survived until the early 1960s, and then the chapel was sold off and used as a film studio, where childhood favourites such as Camberwick Green were filmed. The ornate grounds of the Abode of Love have mostly been redeveloped for housing, as has the chapel. The infamous high wall (which signalled to the outside world that the Abode members wanted nothing to do with it) survives in stretches, though sections have been removed or reduced at the front of the chapel and the gatehouse (see below).

The surrounding landscape is extraordinarily beautiful: the cult owned a number of farms in the area (in order to overcome various trade boycotts put in place by hostile locals), and wandering through the woods at Aisholt, not far away, I located “Princeites Covert”.

In this small, steep-sided thicket (above) one of the several suicides by cult members took place. Many of the wealthy converts to the Abode of Love had had psychological problems before joining up, but the local coroner, the newspapers and the Home Office alleged that Prince’s behaviour had pushed some of them over the edge and into despair when he had questioned their loyalty, or indicated that they might not be among “the saved”.

Here’s a selection of the shots I took, from top to bottom, left to right:
Two shots of the chapel building of the Abode of Love;
the main mansion; one of the wooden gates into the original complex;
looking through the keyhole and into the gardens; the Four Forks signpost;
Louisa Nottidge’s grave at Spaxton parish church, just in front of its door, plus long shot of Spaxton church;
finally, at the bottom, nearby Charlynch parish church, where Prince’s sermons caused a riot among the local gentry and farmers.

Louisa was freed from the asylum in 1849 and fled back to the Abode, dying there in 1858, without ever being reconciled to her family.

Further info:
This video shows Dr Joshua John Schweiso being interviewed about the sect outside the Abode of Love in 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g5sxiUgoo4 . Louisa’s gravestone is no longer easily legible but thankfully Dr Schweiso was able to locate it in the Spaxton graveyard.

Kate Barlow’s memoir The Abode of Love: The Remarkable Tale of Growing Up in a Religious Cult (2007) is a fantastic insight into the final years of the Abode of Love, from the point of view of a child.