Discover Chiswick House and Gardens

A high wall punched with occasional doors leads to a large public garden and park with a remarkable house.

This is Chiswick House and Gardens, a large estate that’s not just an interesting place to visit today, but also the place where grand English gardens changed direction from formal to informal layouts.

Although managed by a trust, the site is split in ownership between Hounslow Council and English Heritage, and most of the landscaped gardens are free to visit.

To wander around is to visit a large landscape that’s clearly a former private estate that’s been looked after, but unless you dig into its history you might not know just how important a location it is.

The ground and house passed through a number of owners, but just under 300 years ago Lord Burlington commissioned the impressive Palladian manor house, but was built without kitchens or bathrooms — as it wasn’t a house to live in. Burlington lived in an older Jacobean manor house next door, and the Palladian house was a gallery, built solely to house the huge collection of art he amassed on trips to Italy.

Eventually, the older manor house was demolished — the modern cafe is on the site — and the Palladian house was expanded to add the missing kitchens, loos and bedrooms.

While the house is impressive — it’s the gardens that are the real story.

Lord Burlington hired the architect and landscaper William Kent to lay out the gardens, and he persuaded his Lordship to ditch the formal gardens that were so common at the time in favour of a more naturalistic landscape. Still very sculpted, but with much softer lines. A straight canal was dug out and turned into the curving lake that’s there today, while a number of small lakes and romantic glades were created.

A very large conservatory followed later, and it’s now famous for the camellias which are large and ancient, and ideally shouldn’t be in a conservatory at all, but it’s too late to change that now.

The bulk of the gardens are free to visit, but if you walk through the conservatory, behind is the kitchen garden, a classic walled garden that would once have been used to produce food for the manor house, and is still an active vegetable and fruit garden. The kitchen gardens are practical as well, with about half the produce sold in the garden each week — so very seasonal produce — and about half donated to local charities.

At the far corner of the kitchen gardens is a locked door, and I was permitted to see what’s behind — another walled garden. They’re not sure when it was abandoned, but likely sometime after WWII, and it’s been untouched ever since.

Now completely overrun with nettles, the ambition — funding permitting — is to restore it to what it was originally used for, as a pear garden from the time when pears were highly fashionable fruits. The walls are historic, and there’s not really enough space to bring in heavy machines to clear the land, so they’re considering a more natural clearance method — pigs.

Pigs love nettles almost as much as humans hate them, and although it’s too early in the planning to confirm if pigs will be used, it’s certainly a very organic way of clearing the site. That matches the rest of the kitchen garden ethos of organic gardening, and also a “no dig” policy for the planting. A local horse stable provides the fertiliser.

They also have a big problem with squirrels, which reminded me of Lord Heseltine’s animosity towards the grey critters.

Large slates, old roof tiles, now act as signs pointing to what is going on, and much more usefully for budding green fingers — why they are doing something.

The main gardens are also getting a makeover under the guidance of a new head gardener, Rosie Fyles who is working to restore some of the overgrown areas to their earlier designs and reopen long blocked off views.

One of the recent improvements has been to something that I wasn’t aware of as significant, and that’s the circular rose garden — which it turns out could well be the earliest rose garden in England that was planted purely for colour and fragrance.

Roses had long been planted, but as a crop for the rose oil, but when the Duchess of Devonshire visited France, she was introduced to the idea of roses for decoration and brought the idea back to England. On my visit, the roses were just starting to wake up from their winter slumber, but should look start to look outstanding in the early weeks of June.

As a garden to wander around, it’s got that curiously delightful mix of semi-formal planting in places, lots of paths around hedges and hidden nooks to discover.

However, there’s also the house, although unlike most other grand estates, here the house is a modest affair compared to the attention given to the gardens. The house is still richly decorated inside though, with a magnificent entrance hall, and an illusion of a much taller central dome.

Compare the deep interior view with the flattened exterior, and you can see it’s a clever optical effect.

A number of rooms around the sides with rich dark velvet wallpapers are the ones filled with art and sculpture. A series of rooms at the rear decorated with gilt plasterwork reminded me of the palm room in Spencer House.

With around a million visitors a year, the cost of running the gardens is met mostly by donations and corporate events. It’s a popular place for weddings and of course the usual summer festivals.

You can comfortably fill at least half a day on a visit ambling around the place. Which isn’t bad for something that’s mostly free to visit. Although the main gardens are free to visit, you pay for the kitchen gardens and house if you visit between Thur-Sun, and if making a trip to enjoy the gardens, it’s worth adding those two to the visit.

Getting to Chiswick House and Gardens

The garden’s main entrances are about halfway between either Chiswick mainline station or Turnham Green station on the Underground. It’s about 15 minutes walk either way to the entrances into the garden.

You can book tickets to the kitchen garden and house in advance, or pay on the day, and the rest of the estate is free to just wander around.