Ham House

The front of Ham House

We have annual passes to the National Trust and so we decided to put them to good use with a trip up the Thames to Ham House.  This was our first visit to the village of Richmond, though really it is still inside London, but still it feels like you are somewhere completely different.  It feels quite similar to Greenwich really, but fewer tourists, which is pleasant, and a less impressive food market.

The Thames, it looks very wide here

The formal gardens

It's then a very pleasant walk along the Thames to the house, which according to the NT is important due to it's display of 17th century power and fashion.  It was built in 1610 and ended up in the hands of William Murray, who was interesting because he was Charles I's whipping boy, a young boy who grows up with the prince and is punished in lieu of the prince.  A form of psychological torture on the young prince who has to see his friend punished for something he had done wrong.  It basically remained in his families hands, even surviving the Civil War, before it was donated to the National Trust in 1949.

We probably should have looked closer at the opening times on the website, since when we turned up we were told the only way to get inside was on a guided tour, and the next one wasn't for another hour or so.  We took a turn about the gardens, but then my feet started to get reeeeally cold and it was still a while for our tour, at which we had already been informed would be cold inside, so we returned our tour tokens and walked back along the Thames.

The rear of Ham House

It seems that the National Trust is very much a summer organisation, I guess that's due to the hundreds of properties they have, which seem to be staffed entirely by volunteers.  And on a cold winters day I wouldn't have been so keen to volunteer to sit around a freezing house making sure the few visitors don't steal anything or smash stuff.

The gardens were quite nice, even in winter, and they had this weird "wilderness" out the back, which was just patches of trees planted at a slightly higher density than normal.  With very well-kept walkways between them.  They did also have an ice-house, which was pretty interesting.  It was like a stone igloo, but dug into the ground as well. It was pretty big, you could have fit a serious amount of ice in there.