Down House

Down House
Kent
Down House
Location
Grid reference:	TQ43176115
Location:	51°19’53"N, -0°3’13"E
Village:	Downe
History
Address:	Down House, Luxted Road, Downe, Kent BR6 7JT
	Built 1770s
	Country house
Information
Owned by:	English Heritage
Website:	Home of Charles Darwin Down House

Down House is a country cottage in Kent which was the home of the naturalist Charles Darwin and his family. It was in this house and garden that Darwin worked on his theories of evolution by natural selection which he had conceived in London before moving to Down.

The house stands next to Luxted Road a quarter of a mile south of the village of Downe in Kent: the village's name was spelled 'Down' in Darwin's day but has evolved into its current spelling since then.

The house, garden and grounds are in the guardianship of English Heritage, have been restored and are open to the public.

History of Down House

In 1651 Thomas Manning sold a parcel of land including most of the current property to John Know the elder, from a Kentish yeoman family, for £345. It has been debated whether this price is likely to have included a house, but, if not, it was Know who built the first farmhouse on the property: some surviving flint walls may date from this period. In 1653 John Know gave the house to his son Roger, probably as a wedding present; and in 1743 the marriage of Mary Know passed the property to the family of Bartholomew of West Peckham in the Weald.

In 1751 Leonard Bartholomew sold the uninhabited house on to Charles Hayes of Hatton Garden.

The property was acquired by the businessman and landowner George Butler in 1778, and it is thought that he rebuilt and enlarged the house: in 1781 he paid the highest window tax in the village. Around this time it was apparently called the Great House. After Butler died in 1783 the property changed hands several times, then in 1819 it went to Lieut.-Col. John Johnson, C.B., colonel of engineers in the East India Company, Bombay establishment. In 1837 Johnson migrated to "Lake Erie near Dunville in Upper Canada", and passed what was now called Down House on to the incumbent parson of the parish, the Rev. James Drummond. The house was re-roofed and brought into good order under the supervision of Edward Cresy, an architect who lived nearby. Around 1840 Drummond left the property vacant and put it up for auction, but it was unsold and lay empty for two years.

1842–1906: Darwins at Down

The Darwin family in 1841 was finding their London house increasingly cramped: both Charles and his wife Emma preferred living in the countryside, as they were disturbed by the constant noise and severe coal smoke air pollution of central London, and they had two young children, William (b. 1839) and Anne (b. 1841). Darwin approached his father Robert Darwin for financing, and with the caution that he should try living in an area for some time before being committed to a move, was given approval to start looking for a suitable house. Charles and Emma sought somewhere about twenty miles from London with railway access and they came close to buying a house near Chobham in Surrey.

In July 1842, Charles and Emma visited Down House, sleeping at "a little pot-house" in the village, which was also "a grocers-shop & the land-lord is the carpenter", and returning to London the following afternoon. There were plenty of trains on the ten mile line from London to the nearest station, but from there it was a long, slow and hilly eight mile drive to Downe, then a small, quiet village was away from main roads, and though local scenery was beautiful on a good day, the house "being situated on rather high table-land, has somewhat of desolate air ... The charm of the place to me is that almost every field is intersected (as alas is our's) by one or more foot-paths— I never saw so many walks in any other country".

The east side of the house: the central block was the original house, the service wing to its left was extended with a schoolroom and bedrooms above the kitchen. The 1877 extension to the right included a new main entrance

The three story house itself stood "very badly close to a tiny lane & near another man's field", and was "ugly, looks neither old nor new" but on the ground floor it had a "Capital study" and a dining room facing east, and a large drawing room facing west, with plenty of bedrooms upstairs. Darwin believed that the price was about £2,200 and he could lease it for one year to try it out.

That Friday was cold and gloomy, and Emma was at first disappointed with the "desolate" scenery as well as being "dreadfully bad with toothache, headache", that evening, but liked the house and grounds better than Charles, finding it "not too near or too far from other houses". On the Saturday the weather changed, and "she was so delighted with the scenery for the first few miles from Down, that it has worked great change in her".

Charles Darwin's study at Down House, restored with original furniture

The house had obvious faults, but it was cheap. Emma preferred a more expensive house in Surrey, and may have hoped that Darwin's father would increase the loan, but life in crowded dirty London was becoming more unpleasant and she was pregnant so unable to continue the search that year.

With advice from the architect and surveyor Edward Cresy, Darwin opened negotiations and eventually his offer of £2,200 was accepted. Emma moved in on 14 September 1842, followed by Charles three days later. Emma gave birth to Mary Eleanor on 23 September, and they were all getting on well – even Darwin's brother Erasmus who had said the place should be called "Down-in-the-Mouth" had altered his opinion, but they were saddened when baby Mary died on 16 October.

The west front of Down House looking out onto its gardens

Darwin made extensive alterations to the house and grounds. An angled bay forming a large bow front extending up through all three storeys at the west elevation of the house extended the drawing room and rooms over it, giving improved views and lighting: Darwin wrote telling his cousin that the first brick was laid on 27 March 1843. By 27 April, work was in hand to lower the lane by as much as two feet and build new flint boundary walls, which together with earth mounds and shrubbery made the east garden more private. A strip of the field was made into a kitchen garden including the experimental plot of ground, and later the greenhouses.

In September 1843, the Darwin family increased with the birth of "Etty" in the house, where all their remaining children were born: George in 1845, "Bessy" in 1847, Francis in 1848, Leonard in 1850, Horace in 1851, and their 10th child Charles Waring Darwin who was born in 1856, but died in 1858.

Between 1845 and 1846, Darwin altered the service wing to the south of the main block, getting the kitchen area rebuilt with the addition of a butler's pantry, and a schoolroom and two small bedrooms on upper floors. The outhouses were rebuilt, and a mound to the west side was removed with a new mound being added to the east to give protection from the wind.

On their first visit Darwin had noted that "The great Astronomer Sir J. Lubbock is owner of 3000 acres here, & is building a grand house a mile off", but thought that he would be too reserved or proud to visit them. In fact, Sir John William Lubbock was delighted that Darwin was coming to Down House and his son, young John Lubbock, soon became close friends with Darwin and a frequent visitor.

The sandwalk, Darwin's thinking path

In 1846, Darwin rented from Sir John William Lubbock a narrow strip of land of an acre and a half adjoining the Down House grounds to the southwest, and had it planted. He named it the Sandwalk Wood. One side was shaded by an old shaw with oak trees, and the other looked over a hedge to a charming valley. Darwin had a variety of trees planted, and ordered a gravel path known as the "sandwalk" to be created around the perimeter. Darwin's daily walk of several circuits of this path served both for exercise and for uninterrupted thinking. He set up a number of small stones at one point on the walk so that he could kick a stone to the side each time he passed, so that he did not have to interrupt his thoughts by consciously counting the number of circuits he had made that day. The Sandwalk also served as a playground for his children. A wooden summerhouse was built at the lower end of the Sandwalk. In 1874, Darwin gave a piece of pasture land to Sir John Lubbock (the son) in exchange for ownership of the Sandwalk Wood.

A new extension at the north end of the house was added in 1858, providing a large new drawing room facing west which became a comfortable family room, and two bedrooms over. The former drawing room was converted into a new dining room, and the old dining room next to the kitchen became a billiard room.

Darwin's greenhouse, where he conducted experiments

Darwin's interest in the Fertilisation of Orchids led him to get a new heated greenhouse constructed under the supervision of John Horwood, the gardener of Mr Turnbull at The Rookery: this was completed in February 1863. In 1872, a verandah was added to the west side of the new drawing room, and in 1877 a new billiard room was added to the east of this block, with the hallway being extended to form a new entrance hall and Georgian-style porch facing east. The new billiard room was converted to a new study in 1881, and the old study where Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species was converted into a smoking room. In the same year Darwin bought a strip of land to the north of the property, beyond his orchard, and had a hard tennis court and a new wall built.

After the death of Frank's first wife Amy, their son Bernard Darwin was brought up by Charles and Emma at Down. Charles Darwin died at the house on 19 April 1882, aged 73. Emma also died there in 1896.

In February 1897, the house was advertised to be let, furnished, at a rent of "12 guineas per week, including gardeners". From 1900 to 1906, George Darwin rented the house out to a Mr Whitehead, who was the first owner of a motor car in Downe.

1907–1922: Downe School for Girls

A girls' boarding school was established at the house in February 1907, co-founded by the headmistress Olive Willis (1877–1964) with her friend Alice Carver. The school began with five mistresses and one girl, but was soon successful and grew to around 60 pupils. Various corrugated iron outbuildings were erected around the house at this time, to serve as the school's chapel, gymnasium, music-rooms and lavatories: these were later removed. The school occupied the house until 1 April 1922, when it moved to larger premises at Hermitage Road, Cold Ash, Berkshire, where it remains. One of the school's houses is still named Darwin. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who was a pupil at the school during First World War, wrote after revisiting the house in the 1930s: "I have never liked scientific people very much, and it mortifies me to think of them trampling reverently around there on visiting days, thinking of Charles Darwin and ignorant of my own youth."

1927–1996: Darwin Museum

Down House today

From 1924, another girls' school was run in the house by a Miss Rain, but this was unsuccessful and closed in 1927. Following an appeal at that year's Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by its president Sir Arthur Keith, the surgeon Sir George Buckston Browne (1850–1945) bought Down from the Darwin heirs for £4,250 in 1927 and spent about £10,000 on repairs. On 7 January 1929 he presented the hosue to the British Association together with an endowment of £20,000 to ensure its preservation in perpetuity as a memorial to Darwin, to be used for the benefit of science and open to visitors free of charge. Down House was formally opened to the public as a museum at a tea on 7 June 1929. In 1931, Buckston Browne gave the Royal College of Surgeons an endowment fund and land adjacent to the Down House property to establish the Buckston Browne Research Farm, a surgical research station. For his efforts in saving the historic house, Buckstone Brown received a knighthood in the 1932 New Year Honours.

Buckston Browne's endowment for the house proved insufficient and the expense of maintenance led to the British Association in turn donating the house to the Royal College of Surgeons, which administered the adjacent Surgical Research Station, in October 1953. In 1962, Sir Hedley Atkins (1905–1983), later President of the Royal College of Surgeons, moved into the house together with his wife and assumed the role of honorary curator.

In May 1954, Down House itself was designated as a Grade I Listed Building and in September 1988 the garden and Sandwalk was added to the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England at Grade II.

1996 to present: Restored house and garden

Down House was acquired in 1996 by English Heritage, with a grant from the Wellcome Trust. It was restored with funds raised by the Natural History Museum from many trusts, and from a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and reopened to the public in April 1998. In 2009, the Darwin Bicentenary Project created a new exhibition on the first floor of the house, telling the story of Darwin's life and work.

Down House and the surrounding area were, in 2006-2007 unsuccessfully nominated by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to become a World Heritage Site.

Outside links

("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Down House)

• Home of Charles Darwin (Down House) – English Heritage
• Darwin at Downe – proposed World Heritage Site
• A scientist's guide to visiting Down House
• Downe House School
  • History of Downe School
• Kent Wildlife Trust

References

• Atkins, Hedley (1976). Down: the Home of the Darwins: the story of a house and the people who lived there (2nd ed.). [Chichester]: Phillimore. ISBN 0-85033-231-1. 
• Bowen, Elizabeth (1950). "The Mulberry Tree". Collected Impressions. London: Longmans Green and Co. pp. 185–194.  (Describes life at Downe House school during First World War)
• Janet Browne (1995), Charles Darwin: vol. 1 Voyaging, London: Jonathan Cape, ISBN 1-84413-314-1 
• Darwin, Charles (1887), Darwin, Francis, ed., The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter, London: John Murray, http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Freeman_LifeandLettersandAutobiography.html 
• Freeman, R.B. (2007), Charles Darwin: A companion (2d online edition, compiled by Sue Asscher, John van Wyhe ed.), Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=A27b&pageseq=1 
• Howarth, O.J.R.; Howarth, E. K. (1933), A history of Darwin's parish: Downe, Kent. With a foreword by Sir Arthur Keith, Southampton: Russell & Co., http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=A540&pageseq=1 
• Reeve, Tori (2009). Down House: the Home of Charles Darwin. London: English Heritage.