A typical abbey of the Middle Ages, c.1914

Oblique view plan & legend showing a typical abbey in the Middle Ages. The plan combines an aerial oblique view of a complex of buildings of all medieval periods, developed and enlarged from a plan, itself adapted from the Plan of Saint Gall. The Plan of Saint Gall is a famous medieval architectural drawing of a monastic compound dating from the early 9th century; the only surviving major architectural drawing from the roughly 700-year period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the 13th century. The relative description in the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition catalogue reads: "In the Abbey we have to realise the regular clergy in their cloistered life retired and devotional, meditative and studious. The Abbey was thus of more patrician type and character, more distinctively intellectual also, while the secular church made the wider and warmer appeal to the emotional and social life, to women and to workers generally."