The National Trust maintains nine historic houses in London but only four are open for walk-up visits, the others now require advance booking. So I've walked up to the four you can still walk up to and given my membership card a wave, because it pays to reacquaint yourself rather than assume you've seen everything before. Here are the easily visitable foursome, largest first, in the hope I might encourage some visits and revisits.
NATIONAL TRUST:Ham House Location: Richmond, TW10 7RS [map] Open: 12-4pm, daily Admission: £17 Period: The Jacobean one
You don't have to leave London to visit a large stately home with glorious gardens, there's a fine one by the banks of the Thames just upstream of Richmond. Ham House was built in 1610, then extended in the 1670s when it was taken over by a court favourite of Charles II. Its original H-shape was half filled-in to create a south-facing facade looking out towards a formal garden, and the interior was lavishly redecorated. The Earls of Dysart looked after the place until maintenance costs became too much and the National Trust snapped it up in 1948. It's scrubbed up beautifully since.
Your wander round the house begins in the Great Hall with its chequered floor and looping overhead gallery. The self-guided tour soon heads upstairs via the wonders of the Great Staircase, its dark wooden panels all hand-carved and watched over by old masters, but also a tad gloomy because they didn't have spotlights in the 17th century so a few electric candles are doing a lot of heavy lifting. The finest first floor room is the Long Gallery, a vision in black and gold flanked by paintings of royalty and the nobility. The house is also littered with intricate cabinets, be they marquetry, lacquerwork or merely ebony and tortoiseshell, these a particular decorative favourite of Elizabeth, Countess of Dysart. They're not labelled so you'll need a QR code to unpick them all, or else ask one of the many strategically-located stewards because they're only too willing to impart a nugget of hard-learned background info.
Back downstairs a long chain of richly bedecked rooms leads through the Queen's Apartments to a ducal bedroom, with furniture, wallpaper and tapestries to match. Even the closets are unnecessarily showy. Exit is through the cellars, which prove to be extensive, including a kitchen and a cloaked tub on a dais that formed one of England's first internal bathrooms. Visitors are then nudged towards the gift shop and second-hand bookshop, both a courteous distance across the courtyard, where the lavender bushes are now going for half price. The Orangery Cafe looks out across a splendid walled garden that's still blooming and delivering seasonal veg, and beyond is that a large formal lawn and criss-cross wilderness garden. My favourite zone is the diagonal parterre with its clipped box cones surrounded by yew hedges, even if it has no basis in the house's horticultural history. And all of this is on Londoners' doorstep, so lucky us.
NATIONAL TRUST:Osterley House Location: Osterley, TW7 4RB [map] Open: 11am-3pm, closed Monday and Tuesday Admission: £17 (£9.50 for just the gardens) Period: The neoclassical one
Osterley was a quiet corner of Middlesex when banker Sir Francis Child bought a Tudor house and asked architect Robert Adam to remodel it. It took him 20 years. Today the Heathrow flightpath roars down one side of the estate and the M4's swiped the other, but the neoclassical mansion in the middle still looks out across a pastoral scene of fields and lakes. Hounslow residents love to drop by and enjoy the parkland, not to mention the cafe, but the National Trust guard the kiosk that allows you further in. The big attraction is the house, a U-shaped block with turrets, pedimented screen and a central courtyard visitors no longer enter through. Instead you slip in through a side door and then straight upstairs - already dazzling - to discover what sights a circuit will bring.
There are several ostentatious rooms to look into, including a tapestry-walled drawing room and a bedroom with a dome-topped eight-poster. Someone from the 18th century had a penchant for greens and pinks which you could describe as clashingly vibrant or else tonally unwise. The extravagant entrance hall is the finest space, a monochrome riot of columns and curves designed to impress. Alas I turned up while the six-monthly floor-wax was taking place so could only stare into the panelled long gallery through a door at the far end for fear of inhaling fumes. Also I see the scullery's no longer part of the free-flow route, and with several rooms roped off if I'd paid the full £17 I'd have felt short changed. That said the fee also lets you into the grounds which are seriously extensive, spanning woodland trails, a Long Walk by the lake and a Tudor walled garden, so could occupy anything from 10 minutes to an hour.
If nothing else, come see the outer park.
NATIONAL TRUST:Eastbury Manor House Location: Barking, IG11 9SN [map] Open: 10am-4pm, Friday and Sunday only Admission: £8.00 Period: The Tudor one
Clement Sisley built his marshside manor during the reign of Queen Elzabeth I, an amazing survivor given it later got seriously neglected and put to alternative use as stables, hayloft and cart-shed. The Society for the Preservation of Buildings recognised its worth in the 1910s and ensured it ended up safely with the National Trust, even when postwar housing estates were built all around it. It's still astonishing to walk down council avenues between Upney station and the A13 and find a Tudor house with twizzly chimneys and a knot garden plonked incongrously in the middle.
There's plenty of house to explore, including attics, backstairs and courtyards that bring a frisson of discovery. Only one of the original spiral staircases survives, ascending via an astonishing curl of oak planks to an upper garret with views towards Barking and Docklands. One room has a fine old fireplace (but not the original, which for some reason ended up in Sussex), another some wispy wall paintings commissioned 400 years ago by a City alderman. But there's a lot of emphasis here on noticeboards and interpretation rather than the shell of the building, including a new exhibition called Eastbury Saved I hadn't had the chance to enjoy before. Even the cafe's more a ploughman's and paninis kind of counter, I suspect in attempt to tempt in more local punters for whom olive and feta frittata probably wouldn't cut it.
I like that you get a proper folded map to take round with you, also that there's so much to read which definitely extends the length of your visit. Eastbury feels a lot more homespun than the two big mansions described above, and is all the better for it.
NATIONAL TRUST:Rainham Hall Location: Rainham, RM13 9YN [map] Open: 11am-4.30pm, Thursday-Saturday only Admission: £6.50 Period: The Georgian one
I'll save this one until tomorrow, save to say it's always well worth the trek.
If today's post inspires you to visit any of these four NT houses, do come back and leave a comment to say so. They're all open on Fridays, so you could plan to make an early start.
