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Fenton House

A merchant's house of 1686 at the top of Hampstead, with early harpsichords kept in playing order and an orchard of thirty kinds of apple behind its walls.

Photo by Justinc, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fenton House was built in 1686, when Hampstead was a village on a hill, for a merchant whose name is lost, and it kept its brick front, its panelled rooms and its walled garden through three centuries of owners until Lady Binning left it to the National Trust in 1952. Its music is what makes it: Major George Benton Fletcher's collection of early keyboard instruments, harpsichords, virginals, spinets and clavichords from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, is kept in playing condition rather than behind glass, and music students come to practise on them, so that a visit is as likely to be heard as seen. Around the instruments are Lady Binning's porcelain, Meissen and Chinese, seventeenth-century needlework, Georgian furniture and the paintings of the actor Peter Barkworth. The garden is a rare survival for London, a formal walled garden dropping to a sunken lawn, a kitchen garden and an orchard of some thirty varieties of apple, with a view from the balcony over the roofs to the City. It opens from spring to autumn.

Where
Hampstead Grove, NW3 6SP
Nearest station
Hampstead · 3 min walk

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