About.

The beginnings.

Foster’s Almshouses and the Chapel of the Three Kings of Cologne are located in the centre of in Bristol, England. They were founded in 1492 by John Foster, a merchant, Mayor of Bristol and parliamentarian, to provide accommodation for Bristol's disadvantaged and poor elderly.

John Foster made his wealth from trading fish and wool with Iceland, which was a major source of commerce in medieval Bristol. He bequeathed 2s 2d (roughly £5 in today’s money) to be divided up each week to the 13 residents for 40 years and stipulated that residents had to be English, unmarried and over the age of 50.

In 1553 Dr George Owen, physician to King Henry VIII, made provisions for an additional ten "poor persons" to live at the almshouses.

The Victorian age.

Bristol was changing in the industrial age, and the once scruffy street that Foster’s Almshouses stood on, Steep Street, was widened to accommodate electrified trams from the newly built tram shed at the top of the street (which is now the restaurant, Zero Degrees). A number of buildings were rebuilt and gentrified, and the street was renamed Colston Street, after the notorious Bristol slave trader.

Bristol Corporation managed Foster's Almshouse until it was taken over by the Bristol Municipal Charities in 1835. They commissioned renowned Bristol architects Foster & Wood to redesign the almshouses and chapel in 1835. Foster & Wood designed many high profile buildings in Bristol including the Bristol Museum, Bristol Grammar School, Bengough’s Almshouses and Bristol University buildings.

The architecture.

Architects Foster & Wood took inspiration from the Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune in Burgundy, France, a charitable almshouse. They designed the new Foster’s Almshouses in the flamboyant Burgundian Gothic Revival style, which was fashionable at the time.

The building work was completed in phases. The South Wing along Colston Street was begun 1861 and the North and East wings in 1883. Due to being built on a slope, the building is two stories at the front and four stories at the rear, and several shops on the Christmas Steps are part of the building. It was built with red brick with black diaper work, limestone window dressings, door frames and pillars. The bricks were supplied by the Cattybrook Brick Co of Almondsbury, Bristol.

The tiled hipped roofs were completed with leaded finials and leaded tops of towers. The central courtyard has ground floor arches and round columns. In the corners stand two square towers, and two first-floor corner statue niches with canted canopies. A statue of John Foster resides in the right-hand one and the left-hand niche is currently empty - we can’t find any record of who originally stood there.

The Chapel of the Three Kings.

The chapel is the only church in the UK dedicated to the Three Kings. They are the Three Wise Men who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, came from the east with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for Jesus. There was a cult of worship of the Three Kings in the late medieval period. After John Foster visited Cologne Cathedral, where the bones of the three Magi are housed in an ornate reliquary, he returned to the Bristol and built the Chapel of the Three Kings of Cologne for the spiritual health of the almshouse’s residents.

In John Foster’s will, his executors were instructed to pay a priest to sing in the chapel for 12 years after his death “on behalf of his soul” and those of his relations. The chapel was refaced and re-roofed in 1861 and the external niches for statues were installed. The three statues of the Three Wise Men and main stained glass window are 20th-century additions.

The stained glass window depicting the Three Wise Men was designed by celebrated stained glass artist Patrick Pollen (1928-2010), and was installed in 1963. The external statues were installed in the 1960s and designed by Ernest Pascoe (1922-1996), who later became Chair of the Royal West of England Academy.

The modern age.

The buildings continued to be run as almshouses until 2007, when it was decided that the building’s facilities were no longer suitable for housing the elderly. The almshouses and chapel were sold to a developer and converted into 18 flats. The proceeds of the sale were then used to build a new purpose-built 'John Foster's Almshouse' in Henbury (north Bristol).

If you might be interested in either renting or buying in the building, please sign up for notifications for when a flat comes on the market. The chapel was not converted into a flat and is available for the quiet enjoyment of the residents.