£56.50 (Non JG member)
Overview
HOLLAND PARK, KYOTO GARDEN & LEIGHTON HOUSE with A Blue Badge Guide. Holland Park is the most romantic of London’s parks, surrounded by streets of breathtakingly beautiful houses from the redbrick Victorian artist studios to white mansions as clean and perfect as the icing on a wedding cake. The Park itself is a gem– the Kyoto Japanese Garden one of London’s glories. Alongside the Park wealthy Victorian artists’ built studios where they schmoozed the cream of society. Leighton House has always been our favourite west London gem. The spectacular Arab Hall is worth the ticket price alone. The house has undergone a £8.5m glow-up with the addition of new spaces including a naturally lit artist’s studio, a café and, at last – proper toilets! We meet our erudite and entertaining Blue Badge Tour Guide at Holland Park at 11.45am where we start the day with free time to buy lunch, OR you can bring a picnic to have in the park. After lunch the group will be taken on a guided walking tour of the park including The Kyoto Garden. At Holland House Lady Caroline Lamb first met Lord Byron, Sheridan drank himself under the table and a querulous aristocrat was shot dead in a duel. The survival of a large private country estate in the centre of the capital until the mid-twentieth century is quite exceptional. Some formal gardens have survived from the early 1800s and beautiful additions have been made, including two Japanese gardens. The Kyoto Garden is beautiful and wonderfully picturesque all year round with a rock waterfall, a Koi-pond and Holland Park’s famous peacocks. We take a short walk through streets once colonised by wealthy and fashionable Victorian artists. The walk ends at Leighton House. Leighton House has been transformed with £8.5m, largely from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Space spoiling walls, from its time as a public library, have been torn down, new exhibition spaces and a beautiful staircase added as well as the De Morgan café – showing off ceramics by Leighton’s contemporary, the novelist and potter William de Morgan. And it’s here, looking out over the garden that you can buy a cuppa before heading for home.