NATIONAL TRUST:Rainham Hall Location: Rainham, RM13 9YN [map] Open: 11am-4pm, Thursday-Saturday only Admission: £6.50 Period: The Georgian one
Rainham is an outlier village almost on the Thames estuary, now the southernmost suburb in the borough of Havering. It seems ridiculous that the National Trust should have anything here but a Georgian merchant's house survives in situ by the parish church, conveniently close to the station. It took them over 60 years to open it up to the public, also £2.5m to fund the renovation, but since 2015 it's been a Queen Anne jewel not enough people traipse out to see. Don't worry about the scaffolding all over the front of the building, it's nothing structural.
With no furniture and fittings to show off, bar some Delft tiles and a dumb waiter, what the National Trust has done is dig into the catalogue of 50 former residents and tell their stories instead. In opening year it was Captain John Harle, the merchant sea captain who built the Hall in the first place, followed by some babies from a postwar nursery. In 2019 they played their trump card - Anthony Denney, a flamboyant photographer for Vogue - who spent much of the 1960s here as the Trust's tenant/custodian. The current focus is Nicholas Brady, for 33 years the rector of neighbouring Wennington, who used the Hall as a vicarage rather than live closer to his flock.
It is somewhat extraordinary to find a three-roomed exhibition devoted to one of London's remotest villages but also rather brilliant, not least because St Mary & St Peter has lots of goodies they can lend. Exhibits include a winged lectern, the Reverend's memorial plaque and some fabulous glass negatives showing how the interior of the house looked on his watch. Brady took a long-term interest in zoology, archaeology and crystallography, which may explain some of the clutter. In the 1890s a nonagenarian relative called Henry Perigal came to stay, most famous for his five-piece cut-and-shift dissection proving Pythagoras's theorem, a diagram which appears on hismonument in Wennington's graveyard.
Where the Trust have been clever is in reusing material from previous exhibitions on the upper floors. Hence John Harle's story still fills two rooms (or three if you include the fleet of ships in the bath), most notably the incredibly unlikely tale of how his will was uncovered by a Rainham resident at a car boot sale in Newark. Anthony Denny's leftovers are gorgeous, and smell good too courtesy of a display referencing the cookery books he illustrated for Elizabeth David. The rooms given over to the nursery and the early 20th century residents aren't quite so engaging but are still very much part of the overall story and may be highlighted downstairs eventually.
There's also a decent-sized garden to enjoy, complete with long herringbone path, stone urn and the pumpkin it seems obligatory all National Trust houses display at this time of year. Part of the original funding conditions was that this be a community garden so everyone's welcome to wander the borders, although it's only unlocked for 25 hours a week so harder to take advantage of than it could be. The cafe in the coachhouse operates similarly. My thanks to the stewards who offered full background info on my way round, be that waiting politely to be asked or creeping into the room and launching into a full-on anecdote. And come on, £6.50 for all of this is a bargain so do come and make Rainham Hall's acquaintance soon, especially if you already have National Trust membership and it's all free anyway.
