Museums

Down House

Darwin's house and garden in the Kent countryside inside Greater London, where On the Origin of Species was written and the thinking path is still walked.

Also in Science & Engineering.

Charles Darwin bought Down House in 1842 to get away from London, and stayed forty years: the theory of evolution by natural selection he had worked out in his notebooks was written up in the study here, published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species, and defended from this desk while the world argued. The house is a plain Georgian one enlarged for ten children and the science that spread into every room, and English Heritage has put the study back with his chair on castors, the books, the specimens and the spittoon; upstairs are exhibitions on the voyage of the Beagle and the man. The garden was his laboratory. The greenhouse where he tested orchids and insect-eating plants stands, the flower beds where he counted seedlings, the worm stone that measured how earthworms turn the soil, and the Sandwalk, the gravel loop through the copse that he walked every day at 12:00, kicking a stone aside at each lap to count them, which is where the thinking got done. Sir David Attenborough narrates the handset that guides you round.

Where

Luxted Road, BR6 7JT

Nearest station

Chelsfield · 59 min walk

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• Crofton Roman Villa1 hr 5 min walk
• Bethlem Museum of the Mind1 hr 40 min walk
• Chislehurst Caves1 hr 46 min walk

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