Convent: A City finds its Heart

What was behind the wall and the wire? The local people knew . . . fine courtyards . . . an old swimming pool . . . dilapidated tennis courts and a remnant garden, now wild and sprawling. The Abbotsford Convent was this haunted place, left to languish for years after the last of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd had gone. In its prime it had been a school, a refuge, a retreat, a workhouse and a prison-the single largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere. In the late 1990s a p...