Orleans House was a home and meeting place for royalty, politicians and gentry in the two centuries it stood on the Twickenham riverside. It was demolished in 1926. Without the foresight of local resident The Honourable Nellie Ionides, reputed to be the richest woman in England in the 1950s, it is likely that the glorious Octagon Room would have suffered the same fate.
Ham House Garden is part restoration and part re-creation of a 17th century landscape, designed with house and garden in harmony, created to impress.
The gardens and grounds of Orleans House were ceremoniously transformed and reconfigured by each occupant of the 18th century house. As the estate expanded down to the river and up towards Richmond Road, the gardens saw orchards, grottos, ice houses, formal planting and wild woodland.
Boston Manor Park is the surviving part of a larger estate that existed in Brentford from the 12th century to the 1920s. It was a priory farm in the 13th century, supporting St Helen’s Priory in the City of London and had later associations with Sir Thomas Gresham, Lady Mary Reade and the Clitherow family. Today it is a public open space and the setting for the 17th century Boston Manor House, and both still retain features from their long history.
Strawberry Hill is “an open grove through which you see a field which is bounded by a serpentine wood of all kinds of trees and flowering shrubs and flowers.”