London - Down House, Downe, Bromley - Charles Darwin's House - postcard

Postcard
• Picture / Image:  The Front of Down House (Home of Charles Darwin), Downe in the London Borough of Bromley
• Publisher:  English Heritage
• Postally used:  no
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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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Down House is the former home of the English naturalist Charles Darwin and his family. It was in this house and garden that Darwin worked on his theories of evolution by natural selection which he had conceived in London before moving to Downe.

The house stands next to Luxted Road 0.25 miles (0.40 km) south of Downe, a village 14.25 miles (22.93 km) south east of London's Charing Cross, which was still known as Down when he moved there in 1842. In Darwin's day Downe was a parish in Kent: it subsequently came under Bromley Rural District, and since 1965 has lain within the London Borough of Bromley.

The house, garden and grounds are in the guardianship of English Heritage, have been restored and are open to the public.

In 1651 Thomas Manning sold a parcel of land including most of the current property to John Know the elder, from a Kentish yeoman family, for £345 (equivalent to £42,553 in present day terms^[1]). It has been debated whether this price is likely to have included a house, but, if not, it was Know who built the first farmhouse on the property: some surviving flint walls may date from this period. In 1653 John Know gave the house to his son Roger, probably as a wedding present; and in 1743 the marriage of Mary Know passed the property to the family of Bartholomew of West Peckham in the Weald. In 1751 Leonard Bartholomew sold the uninhabited house on to Charles Hayes of Hatton Garden.^[2][3]

The property was acquired by the businessman and landowner George Butler in 1778, and it is thought that he rebuilt and enlarged the house: in 1781 he paid the highest window tax in Downe. Around this time it was apparently called the Great House. After Butler died in 1783 the property changed hands several times, then in 1819 it went to Lieut.-Col. John Johnson, C.B., colonel of engineers in the Hon. East India Company, Bombay establishment. In 1837 Johnson emigrated to ""Lake Erie near Dunville in Upper Canada"", and passed what was now called Down House on to the incumbent parson of the parish, the Rev. James Drummond. The house was re-roofed and brought into good order under the supervision of Edward Cresy, an architect who lived nearby. Around 1840 Drummond left the property vacant and put it up for auction, but it was unsold and lay empty for two years.^[2][3][4]

The Darwin family in 1841 was finding their London house increasingly cramped: both Charles and his wife Emma preferred living in the countryside, and they had two young children, William (b. 1839) and Anne (b. 1841). Darwin approached his father Robert Darwin for financing, and with the caution that he should try living in an area for some time before being committed to a move, was given approval to start house hunting.^[5] Charles and Emma sought somewhere about 20 miles (32 km) from London with railway access, such as Windsor, Berkshire,^[6] and came close to buying one near Chobham, Surrey.^[7]

On Friday 22 July 1842, Charles and Emma visited Down House. They slept at ""a little pot-house"" in the village, which was also ""a grocers-shop & the land-lord is the carpenter"", and returned to London on Saturday afternoon, then on the Sunday Darwin wrote to tell his sister of their first impressions. Though there were plenty of trains on the 10 miles (16 km) line from London to the nearest station, from there it was a long, slow and hilly 8.5 miles (13.7 km) drive to Downe. The small quiet village was away from main roads, and though local scenery was beautiful on a good day, the house ""being situated on rather high table-land, has somewhat of desolate air ... The charm of the place to me is that almost every field is intersected (as alas is our's) by one or more foot-paths— I never saw so many walks in any other country"".

From 1924, another girls' school was run in the house by a Miss Rain, but this was unsuccessful and closed in 1927. Following an appeal at that year's Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by its president Sir Arthur Keith, the surgeon Sir George Buckston Browne (1850–1945) bought Down from the Darwin heirs for £4,250 in 1927 (equivalent to £221,344 in present day terms). He spent about £10,000 on repairs and on 7 January 1929 presented it to the British Association together with an endowment of £20,000 to ensure its preservation in perpetuity as a memorial to Darwin, to be used for the benefit of science and open to visitors free of charge. Down House was formally opened to the public as a museum at a tea on 7 June 1929. In 1931, Buxton Browne gave the Royal College of Surgeons an endowment fund and land adjacent to the Down House property to establish the Buckston Browne Research Farm, a surgical research station.^[27][22]

Buckston Browne's endowment for the house proved insufficient and the expense of maintenance led to the British Association in turn donating the house to the Royal College of Surgeons, which administered the adjacent Surgical Research Station, in October 1953. In 1962, Sir Hedley Atkins (1905–1983), later President of the Royal College of Surgeons, moved into the house together with his wife and assumed the role of honorary curator.

In May 1954, Down House itself was designated as a Grade I Listed Building and in September 1988 the garden and Sandwalk was added to the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England at Grade II.

Down House was acquired in 1996 by English Heritage, with a grant from the Wellcome Trust. It was restored with funds raised by the Natural History Museum from many trusts, and from a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and reopened to the public in April 1998.

Down House and the surrounding area has been nominated by the UK government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to become a World Heritage Site. It originally went through public consultation in 2006 and a decision had been expected in the last three days of June 2007. However, ICOMOS warned the DCMS that the House might not meet the criteria for scientific sites on the register, and so in May 2007 the DCMS announced that it was withdrawing the bid with the intention of resubmitting it later. The bid was resubmitted in January 2009, with a decision expected in the summer of 2010.^[28][29]

type=printed

london borough=bromley

period=post-war (1945 - present)

postage condition=unposted

number of items=single

size=continental/ modern (150x100mm)