Down House
Darwin’s home laboratory, writing room and thinking garden. Inside, ground-floor rooms are restored to family life; upstairs galleries unpack voyages, notebooks and experiments. Outside, the greenhouse, kitchen garden and the ‘Sandwalk’ show how daily walks and small tests (worms, orchids, climbing plants) powered a big idea. Plan 90 minutes plus a slow lap of the path where he counted thoughts in footsteps.
Opening Hours
What's not to miss inside?
Darwin’s Study
Where ‘Origin’ took shapeA low armchair, a board on castors and neat piles of notes—efficiency before ergonomics.
📍 Ground floor, front room
The Sandwalk
Ideas paced into beingDarwin looped this path daily, moving flints with his foot to count completed laps.
📍 Garden perimeter path, ‘thinking walk’
Greenhouse Experiments
Small tests, big patternsClimbers, insect-eating plants and cross-pollination trials turned curiosity into data.
📍 Kitchen garden & glasshouse
Voyage & Notebooks
From Beagle to theoryMaps, specimens and tiny field notes compress five years at sea into arm’s-length pages.
📍 Upstairs exhibition rooms
Inspire your Friends
- To test whether earthworms ‘hear’, Darwin had his son play the bassoon near them—no reaction; vibrations in the soil, however, made them dive. Result: worms sense vibration, not airborne sound.
- He timed his own thinking: the Sandwalk’s flints doubled as a lap counter—nudge one per circuit to avoid losing the thread.
- Darwin built a swivel board on wheels so he could glide between desk, specimens and proofs without standing—Victorian productivity hack.
- At Down, he proved sundews digest animal matter and that climbing plants ‘search’ by subtle movements—quiet greenhouse dramas that fed the big theory.
