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Rainham Hall

A sea captain's house of 1729 on Rainham's old street, its wrought-iron railings among the finest in London, the National Trust's since 1949 and open only since 2015.

Photo by ㇹヮィㇳ, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Captain John Harle, a merchant and ship-owner who made his money carrying the building materials of Georgian London up the Thames, built it in 1729 beside the church of St Helen and St Giles: three storeys of brown and red brick in the Dutch-flavoured manner of Queen Anne's reign, with Delft tiles in the fireplaces, painted illusions on the walls of the stair, and outside it the railings with his and his wife Mary's initials twisted into the ironwork, good enough to have been credited to Jean Tijou, who made the gates at Hampton Court. He ran his trade from the coach house in the yard, which is why house and business survive side by side. The Trust took it in 1949 and let it to tenants for sixty-five years, among them a photographer and a nursery school, and opened it in 2015 with exhibitions that change the story told room by room. A community garden with a thirty-tree orchard is behind, and the BBC filmed A Christmas Carol here in 2019.

Where
The Broadway, Rainham, RM13 9YN
Nearest station
Rainham · 2 min walk

Open days follow the Trust's calendar; the house is seen on a guided tour

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