Fenton House

Stop five. Fenton House.

Sixteen eighty six, which makes it one of the earliest and largest merchant's houses left in Hampstead, built when this was a hill village a long carriage ride from London. Lady Binning left it to the National Trust in nineteen fifty two with everything still in it.

Two reasons to go in. The first is that this is not a silent house. It holds the Benton Fletcher collection of early keyboard instruments, harpsichords and spinets and virginals and clavichords, the earliest of them from fifteen forty, and they are deliberately kept in playing order rather than in retirement. Musicians come and practise on them during opening hours. If you are lucky, and you often are, you will hear the house before you reach the first floor.

The second is the garden, which is walled, three hundred years old, and laid out on three levels so you never see all of it at once. The orchard at the bottom grows around thirty heritage varieties of apple and pear that the supermarkets gave up on decades ago, and in autumn you are welcome to pick up the windfalls. Go up onto the balcony for the view south. On a clear day you can see the City from a seventeenth-century roof.

National Trust, so there is a charge, and this is one of only two stops on the whole walk that wants money at the door. Generally Wednesday to Sunday in season, and worth checking before you climb the hill.

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