Track 15 · House & museum · 2:11
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Stop fourteen. Kenwood.
A white villa at the top of a slope of grass, with a lake below it. Before you go in, look at the little bridge on the lake. It is a fake. There is no bridge, only a painted timber front, put there in the eighteenth century because the view needed one, and it has been fooling people from this exact angle for two hundred years.
The house is Robert Adam's, remodelled from seventeen sixty four for William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield, and the Great Library is the reason architects come. It is a room with a curved and painted ceiling, screens of columns at each end, and pale blue and pink and gilt everywhere. It should be exhausting and instead it is one of the calmest rooms in England.
What is hanging on the walls is the real surprise. Edward Cecil Guinness, the first Earl of Iveagh, bought the estate in nineteen twenty five, died two years later, and left the house and sixty-three paintings to the nation on the condition that people could see them for nothing. So there is a Rembrandt self-portrait, late, with two mysterious circles on the wall behind him. There is a Vermeer. There is Gainsborough, Reynolds, Turner and Hals. It is free, it has always been free, and it is never full.
One more thing about that Vermeer. In February nineteen seventy four somebody put a sledgehammer through the barred window and took it, and then demanded the transfer of two IRA prisoners as the price of its return. It came back three months later, wrapped in newspaper, propped in a City churchyard. Nobody was ever charged.
Free. Open daily, and book ahead if you want to be certain of the house.
Do not leave yet. Stay inside, find the portrait of two young women in the garden, one of them carrying fruit. Stop fifteen is standing in front of it.
51.57155, -0.16734 · where this is on a map