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A stone trough runs along the north walk of the cloister: the lavatorium, where the monks washed before meals. On the south walk, twenty shallow niches held the desks they read at. The square was never built to be looked at. It was a corridor.
Fan vaulting was worked out here during the 1300s, and the present cloister was finished under Abbot Froucester by 1412. The cathedral calls that ceiling the earliest fan vaulting anywhere in the world.
The building around it is a working church rather than a monument, with services every day of the year and entry by donation. The nave pillars are stained reddish-brown near the floor, which the cathedral puts down to a fire in 1122 that brought the first roof down.
The cloister is now in the first phase of a repair programme that runs to 2037, east walk first. Hard cement pointing added in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries takes much of the blame: it holds water in, and medieval limestone has to breathe. Gloucester is one of only ten cathedrals in the UK with its own masons on site.
Visitors call the cloister Hogwarts, and the cathedral writes it that way too. Half-Blood Prince shot its Hogwarts corridors here in February 2008: Harry and Ron caught by McGonagall, then Snape and Malfoy at the Unbreakable Vow. The Vow is sworn at the lavatorium, over the trough where the monks washed their hands.