Mention Richard Burton and most people think of the great Welsh actor, but to Victorians the name would have conjured up a great moustachioed explorer instead. This Richard lived an astonishing life with some notable firsts, aided by the fact he was a brave soul capable of speaking dozens of different languages. In 1853 he adopted several disguises in order to attend the Hajj in Mecca, an act strictly forbidden to non-Muslims, for the purposes of research. In 1858 while searching for the source of the Nile on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society he became the first European to see Lake Tanganyika. In 1886 he translated The Arabian Nights into English for the first time, and three years later followed this up with the Kama Sutra. And after he died in 1890 his wife Isabel built him a unique mausoleum in Mortlake in the hope his deeds would be long-remembered. This appears to have been successful.
It's made of stone but looks like a tent, even down to the ripples in the canvas. The roof has a gold star above a cross above a row of gold stars and crescents, reflecting Richard's ambivalence to following a single religion. Isabel compounded this by erecting the mausoleum in the graveyard of a Roman Catholic church, one creed he never adopted, hence you can see the exterior round the back of St Mary Magdalen's in Mortlake any day between 9am and 3pm. However the structure was vandalised in the 1950s and has been closed ever since, even to conservators, the only opportunity to peer inside being up a short ladder round the back (through the blank pane where the stained glass window used to be). Now thankfully a lottery grant has facilitated repairs to the structure and the unblocking of the door so it's finally possible to go back inside for the first time in 70 years, as the Open House posters proudly proclaimed.
It's such a small space that the organisers were only able to allow in five at a time, the queue corralled in the church hall with an exhibition and a video. Once fully briefed we stepped inside a space both reverent and joyful, complete with camel bells in the roofspace that used to jangle every time Isabel came to pay her respects. The central shrine is bedecked with candleholders, pictureframes, glass and ceramics of no special import. Some of the lanterns came from the British consulate in Trieste, the Burton's last posting. Encircling the walls is a gold-painted quote from St Luke's gospel ("Stay with us because it is towards evening and the day is far spent"). The ceiling is painted with cherub sunbursts unnervingly resembling the sky above Teletubbyland. And there to either side are the actual coffins of Richard and Isabel, his the more ornate, the repositories of two souls incredibly well-travelled even by modern standards and very much not forgotten.
When St Leonards Court in East Sheen was being built in 1938, the threat of imminent war encouraged the owners to build a private air raid shelter out front. This was accessed through a small hut down a short staircase with one dimly-lit room to either side, all tucked beneath a layer of lawn and concrete. When war broke out privileged residents could come down and sit crammed onto benches waiting for the all clear to sound, while those in the houses opposite had to take their chances at the municipal shelters several streets away. The Blitz led to much longer spells underground so two additional rooms were built with space for 48 very basic bunk beds. No bombs ever landed hereabouts so the shelter was thankfully never tested, and perhaps more surprisingly it's also survived the subsequent 80 years and is occasionally opened up for public visits.
The handrail on the stairs is about the only thing that's new, beyond which is the same musty limewashed space and what's left of the original fittings. Two lightbulbs were all that lit each of the benched rooms, with Gents and Ladies chemical toilets tucked behind a slim partition. Each room had a tiny escape hatch accessed via a dubious ladder, these doubling up as ventilation hatches embedded in the lawn. No bunks survive but a few fragile shelves remain (DO NOT TOUCH), one with a dangling scrap of material that was used as a makeshift lampshade. The passageway still has numbered coat hooks, one room still has a heater, and its these authentic leftovers which helped residents get the shelter listed when developers threatened to replace it with fresh flats.
These days the shelter is only opened to the public once a year but all local schoolchildren get the opportunity to come down, one class at a time, and experience how challenging wartime civilian life might have been. I suspect they're all too young to realise how grim it would have become down here after a night of heavy cigarette smoking, instead aghast at how boring it would have been without wifi. My mind turned to how the wartime generation somehow endured such basic conditions night after night, how inhabitants of Ukraine are coping with something similar right now and how thus far I'd avoided anything so terrible. Some Open House venues are both a treat and a dire warning, even when hidden at the far end of an East Sheen cul-de-sac.
Another Richmond street, another mausoleum containing a rich man and his lover. However this time the man is the 2nd Earl of Kilmorey, an Irish nobleman, and the woman is his much younger mistress Priscilla Hoste. Despite the 30 year age gap she died first and Francis was so disconsolate he had a pink and grey Egyptian-style mausoleum built, then refused to tell anyone who was in it. It started out in Brompton Cemetery, then when the Earl moved to Chertsey he had it moved and installed in his own grounds there. Later he returned to his original house by the river in Twickenham and moved it again, and here his nomadic mausoleum finally rested. Today it remains locked away in a private patch of garden beside St Margarets Road, the bones of a 92 year-old nobleman at rest beside his 31-year-old bit on the side.
The annual Open House opening is a rare opportunity to even see the mausoleum, let alone step inside. This heavily decorated portal resembles the top of a liftshaft to the underworld and is penned off on an octagonal dais. Each of the four sides has a bronze panel which looks like a door but only one opens, unlocked by a unique circular key with umpteen prongs. The interior is rather plainer than at Mortlake, the only decoration being a marble bas-relief of the dying Priscilla on the far wall because this nobleman was obsessed. The orange light is amazing, all of it pouring in through four star-shaped glass panels in the ceiling. But it was again unnerving to be standing between two dead bodies, particularly given neither lead-lined coffin has fared well over the years. Francis probably thought he and Priscilla would be alone together for eternity, yet every year the nosey come looking for four hours on a Sunday afternoon.
All three of these Open House visits were coordinated by a local conservation group called Habitats & Heritage, formed in 2020 by a merger of the Environmental Trust for Richmond upon Thames and the South West London Environmental Network. We should perhaps be glad their name isn't longer. They also maintain the Bazalgette Mausoleum in Wimbledon and Grove Gardens Chapel in Richmond, and if you'd organised your weekend carefully you could have visited all five sites. A shout out too to the Mortlake with East Sheen Society who staffed the air raid shelter opening, and it really is amazing how much outer suburban heritage is looked after (and made presentable) by citizens keeping history alive.
