Ushaw is open Wednesday to Friday from 11am til 5pm, and we offer guided tours of our wonderful buildings. For more information on who we are, our history and visitor details, click below.
Wednesday to Saturday 11am - 5pm
Wednesday to Saturday 1pm - 5pm
In association with The Court Inn in Durham, Ushaw will now be offering food in our magnificent refectory.
Entry to the Main House and Chapels is free. Guided Tours and certain events are chargeable.
Ushaw has a tradition of choral singing going back over 200 years. A new choir is being established to revive and renew that tradition – with hopes to have about 35 singers.
To get involved, visit our page.
Like music, theatre has been a feature of life at Ushaw
since its inception in 1808. We want to bring together local people interested
in performing and supporting theatrical productions at Ushaw and create a new theatre
company.
To get involved, visit our page.
We are delighted to announce that Mass will be celebrated in the Sacred Heart Chapel (next to St Cuthbert’s Chapel) at 12.30 p.m. on Fridays by Ushaw’s new chaplain in residence Canon Bob Spence.
Canon Bob was on the staff at Ushaw many years ago and has just retired as Parish Priest at Lanchester.
We hope this will be appreciated by visitors and local people.
Gervase Phinn returns to County Durham with his own unique style of storytelling. Tickets £12, light suppers in The Refectory Cafe from 6pm.
Simon Fidler's new choir, performing for the second time in St Cuthbert's Chapel. Beautiful Capella choral music, with the theme of 'light' and settings by Macmillan, Whitacre and Lauridsen amongst others. Retiring collection.
Professor Stephen Regan and his friends will be returning to Ushaw for another evening of magnificent prose and expertly selected poetry. Another relaxing evening of culture at Ushaw.
Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey, first Poet Laureate of Belfast and winnner of the T. S. Elliot Prize for Poetry, to read at Ushaw College on Wednesday, 27th September 2017. Sinéad Morrissey is the author of six poetry collections: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009), Parallax (2013), and On Balance (2017). Both Through the Square Window and Parallax were the winners of the Irish Times Poetry Prize and Parallax was the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2013. Her other prizes include The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, first place in the UK National Poetry Competition, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. In 2013, she was appointed as the first Poet Laureate of Belfast. Sinéad is the new Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, where she is also Director of the Centre for Literary Arts.
Tickets £5
The Royal Northern Sinfonia is coming to Ushaw for a performance of some of the best classical music around. Including Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, Borodin's String Quartet in F Minor, and Mendelssohn's Octet in E-flat. Performance starts at 7.30pm in the Exhibition Hall, with food available in The Refectory from 6pm. Tickets £10, book early to avoid disappointment!
The residency, 'Sculpting with Light: Medieval and Modern Cosmology' confronts human attempts to grasp and master the structure and meaning of the universe. Inspired by Durham’s resources, from illuminated medieval manuscripts to the DiRac2-Super-Computer, I am investigating the world of medieval cosmology from Aristotle to Dante, via Islamic astronomy, in conjunction with the cutting edge of modern galaxy modelling and soft matter physics and material-flow.
I am exploring key themes of medieval and modern cosmology within the project. The central importance of light to the universe in both periods, the notion of power and movement within the heavens, the importance of geometry in establishing sense of place, and ideas about unity and complexity, order and disorder, structure and entropy. Medieval and modern cosmologies have very different premises, but an underlying interest in order, mathematical explanation, and a powerful sense of the incredible scale of the universe.
I am also be working in collaboration with the University of Sunderland, National Glass Centre, Dr Cate Watkinson and Dr Colin Rennie, of the Department of Glass and Ceramics, and their undergraduate and postgraduate students. A film of the project, titled 'Through a Glass Darkly', will be made by film-maker Alan Fentiman.
Ushaw College was founded over two hundred years ago and has a rich and fascinating history, with some of the finest Victorian architecture in the North East - surprisingly however, it is relatively unknown. We are now opening up our beautiful chapels and performance spaces for an exciting and varied programme of folk, classical, jazz and choral music as well as talks, plays, exhibitions and services. Our impressive buildings and grounds, which are also being restored, are worthy of a visit themselves and will be open, along with our gift shop and Café Ushaw, before and after events as shown in our programme. We hope that as a result, Ushaw will soon be much better known, it will be a major cultural venue for the North East and it will become a special place for local people to pop in and spend time in the beautiful gardens and chapels.
Fr. John Marsland
