Down House, Kent, July 2021
This page contains photos of Down House in Kent, England, taken in July 2021.
5) The gardens at the back of the house
6) The walled garden, including the greenhouse
7) The picnic area and adjoining garden area
1) Introduction
In early July 2021, I went on a day trip to Down House in Kent. Down House was the home of the naturalist, geologist, and biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Charles Darwin moved into Down House in 1842 and lived there, with his family, for forty years until his death in 1882.
Down House is in a quiet rural location, about 15 miles south of central London. Darwin and his family moved from central London to Down House because they were finding their London house increasingly cramped and because they disliked the noise and smoky air pollution of London.
It was in Down House that Darwin wrote his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. In this work, Darwin proposed that the diversity of species in the fossil record and in the modern world was a consequence of a process he called natural selection. His theory of evolution by natural selection unified a large collection of facts into a coherent framework and essentially created the modern subject of biology. The theory of evolution by natural selection is the unifying theory of biology.
Down House itself appears to have been built in the early eighteenth century, replacing a house that already existed at the site. When Darwin lived at Down House, he oversaw a number of extensions to the property.
A few years after the Darwin family stopped living at Down House, it became a girls’ boarding school from 1907 to 1922. It was subsequently preserved as a museum to commemorate the life and work of Charles Darwin. Then, in 1996, Down House was acquired by English Heritage, who now maintain the house and grounds as a tourist attraction.
Below I present 80 photos that I took on my day trip.
2) Front of the house
Firstly, we have a series of photos that show the front of Down House and the front garden:
3) Inside the house
On my day trip to Down House, I went inside the house and took a number of photos (using a different camera to the one I used outside). Inside the house, there are rooms on public display on the ground floor and first floor. The rooms on the ground floor are presented as they would have been in Darwin’s time. Arguably the most interesting of these rooms is Darwin’s study, in which he wrote his celebrated treatise On the Origin of Species. This room contains objects that Darwin himself used, including his chair and writing board. Here are pictures of Darwin’s study:
Another of the rooms on the ground floor is the billiard room:
Other rooms on the ground floor include a dining room and a drawing room with a piano, but I did not take pictures of these. After touring the ground floor, I walked up the stairs. Near the top of the stairs is a portrait of Darwin as an old man:
At the top of the stairs, there is an impressive grandfather clock:
On the first floor, there is a corridor that contains a glass cabinet with a display of stuffed birds. Such displays were popular with Victorian naturalists. Here is a picture of the glass cabinet:
The first floor also contains a museum about Darwin’s life and work, as well as a games room. Furthermore, there is the bedroom of Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma. This is the room in which Darwin died in 1882. Here are pictures of Darwin’s bedroom:
4) Back of the house
Next, we have a series of pictures of the back of Down House:
5) The gardens at the back of the house
The gardens at the back of the house are shown in the next series of pictures. In one corner of the garden is the “Wormstone”, which is a stone that was placed in the ground as part of an experiment, during Darwin’s time at Down House, to measure the rate at which worms displace soil. The stone itself is cylindrical, about 12 inches in diameter, with a hole in the centre. Two metal rods are bedded in the chalk beneath, protuding upwards through the hole. As worms displace soil, the stone sinks into the ground but the metal rods do not. This makes it possible to measure the rate at which the stone sinks into the ground. Darwin’s son Horace eventually deduced that the stone sank two millimetres a year. Here are the pictures, with the pictures of the Wormstone at the end:
6) The walled garden, including the greenhouse
If you stand in the gardens at the back of Down House, and then walk further away from the house, you soon reach a garden area that is partly walled and which contains a greenhouse. Darwin carried out botanical experiments in the walled garden and in the greenhouse. The family also grew vegetables in the walled garden. Here is a series of pictures taken in the walled garden and greenhouse:
7) The picnic area and adjoining garden area
A gap in the wall leads from the walled garden to a picnic area, which itself has an adjoining garden area with an artificial beehive. Pictures of the picnic area and adjoining garden area are given next:
8) The sandwalk
After having lunch in the picnic area, I went back into the walled garden, walked to the end of it, and then followed the signposts to the “sandwalk”. The sandwalk is a circular walking route through a small wood. This walking route was created as a gravel path at Darwin’s behest in 1846. It was Darwin’s routine to take a daily walk of several circuits round this path. This daily walk served both for exercise and for uninterrupted thinking. Thus, the sandwalk was Darwin’s “thinking path”. The next set of pictures were taken in the countryside between the walled garden and the sandwalk wood. From the countryside, I was able to see Down House and Darwin’s greenhouse in the distance, and in the last picture, I used the zoom on my camera to zoom in on Down House. Here are the pictures:
Finally, here is a series of pictures that I took whilst walking around the sandwalk:
It was great to visit Down House, and see where Darwin lived and worked. I also enjoyed walking around his “thinking path”. As I did so, I looked around at the rich diversity of life in the woodland and felt inspired by it, perhaps a little like Darwin would have been, all those years ago.