Situated a short distance from Barking Town Centre between Abbey Road and Broadway. The Abbey remains are open to the public at all times. There is no admission charge. Barking Abbey was founded by St Erkenwald in AD 666 for his sister St Ethelburga. The manner of it was recorded by the Venerable Bede writing a generation later: 'When Sebbi... ruled the East Saxons, Theodore [Archbishop of Canterbury] appointed over them Earconwald to be their bishop in the city of London... before he was made bishop [he] builded 2 goodly monasteries, 1 for himself [at Chertsey in Surrey], the other for his sister Ethelburga... in the province of the East Saxons at the place that is named in Bericingum...' The first Abbey was destroyed by the Vikings in AD 870.100 years later the Abbey was re-founded as a Royal foundation. This allowed the King to nominate each new abbess on the death of the old.Under royal patronage, queens, princesses and members of the nobility all became abbesses.In 1541 the Abbey was dissolved by order of King Henry VIII. The nuns were pensioned off and the buildings soon demolished. For almost 400 years the Abbey site was used as a quarry and a farm. This, the oldest estate in Essex, remained a viable entity until the railway brought London rolling eastwards.
The original Barking foundation was a double (though not mixed) monastery of both men and women under an Abbess, not unusual at that time. Archbishop Theodore disapproved, but it was left to Archbishop Dunstan 300 years later to introduce reforms making Barking a strict Benedictine nunnery, the greatest in the country and the only early Saxon monastic foundation in Essex to survive until the Dissolution.