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A white Palladian villa by the Thames, built for a king's mistress with money she made him give her, free.
Free
Henrietta Howard was mistress to George II while he was Prince of Wales, deaf, clever and unhappily married, and she used the settlement she extracted from him to build a house of her own in 1724, at a time when a woman keeping her own household was itself remarkable; Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, her neighbours and friends, helped lay out the garden. Roger Morris and Lord Herbert designed it after Palladio's Villa Cornaro, a white cube with a great room on the first floor, and it became the pattern for the English villa and, across the Atlantic, the plantation house. The London County Council bought it in 1902 to stop the builders and opened it the next year, the first Georgian house in England saved by a public body. English Heritage restored it in 2022, with the rooms conserved, the story of Henrietta told in them, and the gardens and their nine-pin bowling alley put back. The house is free from Wednesday to Sunday, and the sixty-odd acres of park along the river are open every day.
Step-free access
Opening hours, as recorded in OpenStreetMap: Apr-Oct
The park is open daily; the house opens on limited days.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.