Polesden Lacey

Tuesday 22 August

The sound of the 7.05am flight from Fuengirola coming into land at Luton was enough to get the kettle on and we were up washed and dressed in no time at all. We decided that as Campy is back to Bilbo tomorrow perhaps she should have a treat with a bit of a wash and brush up. Out with the buckets and sponges. After breakfast we were off back to do battle on the M25. 

Strangely the traffic wasn’t too bad and we made good progress. We have booked onto a site near Bilbo’s but before we went there we thought we would break the journey by popping into Polsden Lacey at Great Bookham, near Dorking, Surrey. When we arrived we were quite surprised by the amount of cars in the car park, clearly this was not going to be a quiet stroll around the country house and gardens. It turned out it was a sort of mother and child day and the gardens were full of push chairs and children running all over the place. 

The house however, is lovely and was owned by Mrs Grenville a famous Edwardian hostess who had a rags to riches life. She purchased the house in 1906 to hold lavish parties and to society-climb. Not very well educated but a good judge of character she used her skills to climb to the dizzy hight of entertaining royalty in her home. This was all in the 1940/50‘s so you can work out for yourself who would have been there but was an abdication about that time!! The house has lots of photo’s of visitors from Princes to Kings and was decorated very elegantly. It has the feel of being a very comfortable home and you could imagine yourself living quite happily in it. (not something you can say about all NT houses). Anyway, it is easy to see why guests would love to be invited. 

Something we found amusing was that guests were not expected to rise before midday and if they did they were to sit quietly in the balcony....

Following Grenville’s death in 1945 the house was handed over to the National Trust through her will. In their wisdom they immediately sold a good portion of the contents of the house to raise money. Now we are great fans of the NT but it is inexcusable that at that time they felt it appropriate to sell off the family silver like that. It turns out they have been trying to buy it all back ever since! 

Granville did have a house in London so some of the furniture was brought over from there. The downstairs is intact and gives the visitor an idea of the opulence that surley would have continued upstairs. Apparently, there are plans to complete the renovation of the 17 bedrooms in the near future. Our favorite rooms were the library and the gold room both simply breathtaking but for different reasons.

Emerging back into the sunlight we continued our visit into the gardens which are extensive, beautiful and well kept. The views from the garden are amazing and one could easily spend the day sitting on one of the lawns simply looking at the views.

So a great day was had at Polsden Lacey. 

We are now camped at Westerham Heights Farm, Westerham is situated on the top of Biggin Hill. Now ‘that was a climb that was’, it is easy to see why the site is called Westerham ‘Heights’. We arrived at the site at 4pm so decided to polish the van then it rained.......