Michael Faraday's Shed

Well - not actually his real shed - but a teeny-tiny installation/museum that's been set up inside the old shipyard's clerk's 'office' (looks exactly like a bog-standard B&Q garden shed to me) at Trinity Buoy Wharf.

Being such an artistic crew, the guys at TBW couldn't just leave a boring old shed on the site, so Ana Ospina has decorated it, using antiques, found objects and things 'of the sea' such as fishing nets and those lovely glass weights that I only seem to see decorating the homes of friends who live by the sea, rather than actually at the seaside itself, to create some sort of imaginary 'study' for Victorian science-hero Michael Faraday.

If that sounds a bit random, there is a reason for putting it there - Faraday worked out of Trinity Buoy Wharf for some years, helping to develop lighthouses, in between inventing the Faraday Cage - a structure based on Benjamin Franklin's somewhat risky studies in storm-management (using kites) ensuring that lightning or other electromagnetic charges strike round something rather than through it, and discovering the Faraday Effect, which is something to do with the polarisation of light in relation to magnetic fields, the details of which, frankly, evade me.

Faraday's work on the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouses (my favourite mental image is definitely of how they were tested - some poor sod used to be sent up to Shooters Hill of dark winter's night to see if they could spot it...) is being celebrated in this minute work of art - with the usual sound effects, words, images and atmosphere - and it's really rather fun. The artist has a beautiful (but tricky to navigate) website here

When I first saw The Faraday Effect (the shed is named after the phenomenon I don't understand above), it was tucked round the back, next to Fat Boy's Diner, but I went back the other day and noticed it was gone.

Slightly worried, I had a poke around and realised it's been moved to the wharf-front, much closer to the lighthouse itself, not far from the entrance to Jem Finer's Longplayer, which I'll get onto another day. It's open every weekend (as is Longplayer) between 11am and 5pm

Thames Barrier Park

Pontoon Dock

I haven't been on a local 'excursion' for ages - but yesterday was sunny and bright and I wanted something different.

I'd noticed the strange lines of undulating hedges of the Thames Barrier Park from the DLR; I thought it would be fun to walk among them. After all, we can't be sure how many warm, sunny Sundays we have left.

I entred via those hedges - a living scuplture called Green Dock by Alain Cousseran and Alain Provost - who I could have sworn was a racing driver ;-) - past some fountains which, I'm happy to say, were playing at 11.00 on a Sunday morning (so many features like that get quietly turned off after the grand opening.)

I wandered up and down beautiful - and slightly unsettling, not sure why - lines of alternating hedges (a bit on the fluffy side just now, they could do with a haircut) planted with good late-summer flowers, towards what I assumed was a viewing point at the end.

It's a surreal walk once you get down amongst those hedges, which are much higher than they look from above - with an almost Alice In Wonderland feel to it. It wouldn't surprise me to see the White Rabbit run out, looking at his pocket watch, or to look down another row and see the Mad Hatter having a tea party. Under the hedge, a caterpiller on a mushroom would be puffing away at a dodgy-looking concoction in a hookah. Of course, if I looked again, they'd be gone...

The weird Green Dock is my favourite bit, but I was staggered when I got to the top and realised that the weird hedges are just a tiny bit of this modern park. Yes, there are dramatic views of the barrier:

but there are also wide spaces, a little wilderness area, places for organised sport or a kickabout, and a kiddie's playground.

I had a coffee on the decking outside the cafe - I'm savouring each outdoor coffee I can get these days. I suspect it will be cosy behind those giant plate-glass walls in in the crisp Autumn mornings to come.

This is not a 'day out' in itself, but it's a nice thing to do for different - a goal on a Thames Path walk, perhaps, or a quick trip along the DLR.

Opening hours are here.

An Act Of Royal Vandalism

"Goodness, what a lovely ceiling!"

"That old thing? If you like it so much do take it with you, My Dear."

Don't you just find yourself saying that every time you have guests round? It's probably a good thing that Queen Anne, possibly one of the dullest monarchs and definitely the biggest Royal vandal Greenwich has known, didn't spend much time at Greenwich, or we'd have lost the walls and floors of the Queen's House too (we'll get onto the name-'em-and-shame-'em commoner vandals on other occasions). It also points to the perils of painting beautiful ceilings onto canvas and pasting them onto the roof like Orazio Gentileschi did, instead of doing it properly by spending years on your back on a scaff-tower...

I hope you lot had a more productive Open House Weekend than I did. Of the six buildings I tried to visit on Saturday, I managed just one, largely due to sodding London Transport and sodding, sodding South East Trains who between them shut most of the tube and Maze Hill and Westcombe Park and North-sodding-Greenwich, and which meant it took me nearly an hour just to get out of Greenwich.

The one I did get to, though, I have been trying to visit for months.

Marlborough House, in Pall Mall, is a lovely place. One of the few remaining early 18th Century town houses in London, it's a glorious Stuart affair, complete with extensive gardens and murals all over the place, but I can't see that it would be much diminished had it had its own ceiling, instead of nicking ours.

Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was a feisty woman, well-versed in the politics of her age, and afraid of no one. At first, the frankly wimpy Anne was impressed with her, and they played together at being 'ordinary,' taking tea together as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman, and giggling at the world. I'm not sure what Anne was doing visiting Greenwich - she certainly didn't go there very much - but on one occasion she must have been accompanied by her Lady of the Bedchamber, who seemed to consider the Queen's houses as her own personal shopping mall.

Talking of the Mall, the Queen had already granted Sarah a large chunk of her grounds between the Mall and Pall Mall so that she could build herself a grand house. The piece of land didn't go quite up to Pall Mall, though, and Sarah was too mean to buy the little strip of land between her new gaff and the road, something she would regret later...

She admired the paintings on the ceiling at the Queen's House, and from what's left of them, there was indeed much to admire. Designed by Gentileschi along with Inigo Jones who built the place, they were painted in 1635, with or without (but probably without) his daughter Artemesia, and, as I mentioned earlier, painted on canvas stretched across wooden frames.

The pictures were based on a famous textbook, Cesare Ripa's Iconographia, which had models for classical designs. This particular set shows Old Testament scenes - The Finding of Moses, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife etc., a sundry group symbolising the Nine Muses and, in four separate panels the Arts - painting, sculpture, architecture and music.

I have never come across anything that was so heavily patrolled by people stopping other people taking photographs, and once they discovered my camera in the bag-search, I was a marked Phantom. No chance of a picture. I can't find one on the internet either, so you'll just have to imagine it.

But back to the Royal vandal. Anne gave the ceiling to Sarah as a gift. The canvases were ripped down and transported to Westminster where - OMG - they were too big. No one had bothered to measure them first. No problem, they thought. Better too large than too small. They just got the scissors out. The ceiling was hacked back from 5.5sq m to 4.6sq m. Bish Bosh. Tidy job, mate.

And very nice it looks too. Lots of gold and overpainting, joined by lurid paintings on the wall of an almost opposite subject - the sundry wars that the duchess's husband had been fighting in. Some of the pictures are really quite eye-popping - complete with dead bodies, the rolling eyes of horses and peasant women stripping corpses. I'm not convinced much thought went into marrying the two subjects...

Sarah and Anne famously fell out, and the Queen probably regretted giving her ceiling to the duchess. Much as the duchess must have regretted not buying that strip of land. A woman with a talent for falling out with people (she fought with Sir Christopher Wren over the building of Marlborough House and finished it herself) she later clashed swords with the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, who cannily built the 18th Century equivalent of a tower block between her and the road...

To cover up the edges, the ceiling was heavily overpainted, and bits added and subtracted. During the 19th Century, a minor royal wallpapered over the paintings (I'm not sure whether it included the ceiling or just those scary walls) but the place stayed a house of opulence and there's no doubt about it, that ceiling does look good where it is.

But I can't help feeling it's wrong. The Queen's House always seems so - well, austere, when it shouldn't. It was designed to be every bit as fabulous as its later neighbour, the Painted Hall, and yet it is stripped. Elegant, yes, but denuded. There was a laser display panel which projected the ceiling until recently, when, presumably, it was commandeered by the BBC and redeployed for I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue...

There are two ways I can think of to see this ceiling. 1) You can become a head of state of one of the Commonwealth Countries - the building now operates as the Commonwealth Secretariat, or 2) you'll just have to wait until next Open House Day. Sorry guys...

The Chingford Meridian

Another in my Greenwich-related days out today; the glorious Chingford Meridian. Right at the top of Pole Hill, the highest point in Chingford, the then-Astronomer Royal, John Pond, erected an obelisk so that everyone north of the river could delight in Britain being the centre of the world. It was put up in 1824 under the excuse that it would help astronomers find True North from the transit telescope. It was the pride of Chingford.


Then disaster struck. Zut alors! The Meridian line changed. It wasn't as bad as it could have been - Paris was most keen to become the city of the Meridian - but it did shift everything by the frustratingly short distance of 19 feet, in 1850. Suddenly the good folks of Chingford felt as though they were somehow committing a fraud - luring unsuspecting meridian-chasers up to the top of the hill, only to sell them a lie.

They considered just moving the monument - but it was solid granite and had been enough of a huff and puff the first time. No one wanted the job of moving it again...

It hung around like a bad smell, embarrassing the mayor and shaming the councillors for 34 years. When the new line was officially adopted in 1884, they decided enough was enough. A new, somewhat less attractive pillar was erected (I mistook it for some kind of MOD relic when I first saw it) and an apologetic plaque stuck on the old one.

Visiting the monuments is quite a fun quest, if you're stuck for something to do in the long school holidays. We spent quite some time trying to work out exactly where it was, so you don't have to - the map reference is here - and, in fact, once you actually have the map it's quite obvious where it is - it's the bit marked "Obelisk..."

You can drive reasonably close - go to the top of a loop-y road of a very residential nature and park as near the apex as possible. You have to climb the last 50ft or so, but it's not a big deal - the grass is roughly cut and although there are no signs you just head for the top.

We had a fight against time - a massive storm loomed in the West - we watched it approaching through the handy gap in the trees (hence the moody look of the shot at the top - click on it to see it properly.)

I'd say that the very best time to go would be on a bright winter's day, when the trees are bare. The view is of central London - the Gherkin, BT Tower, London Eye, etc. and very dramatic, but if the trees were leafless I'm pretty sure you could see Greenwich (after all it was intended for exactly that...)

Most of the time we were alone, though a snogging couple did turn up at one point, and thinking about it, it's a perfect lovers' walk. In between slurps, he loudly announced that the Meridian Line began at the Millennium Wheel. She ooohed and aahed appropriately.

They didn't last long up there, and we didn't last much longer than them - the storm was getting closer and closer. We left it as long as we dared, but still didn't make it back down the hill before giant drops announced a torrential downpour. The last part was an undignified scramble down some rather muddy slopes in great stair rods of rain.

There's one last oddity about this place. On the granite column, another small plaque tells us that TE Lawrence (of Arabia) and his friend Vyvyan Richards had intended to build a place to print copies of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the top of the hill. It never happened - but Richards lived in a hut up here until 1922.

Random but fun...

Right Royal Car Boot Sale

Q: What do The Greenwich Phantom and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh have in common?
A: When they went to the Historic Dockyards at Chatham they were both really only interested in seeing one thing - the bits and bobs of the Cutty Sark that are currently in storage there.

To be honest I didn't really think they'd be in some place the public could go. And I certainly didn't expect to see them in the open air. For some reason I just assumed that they would be being kept in a warehouse somewhere obscure, under lock and key. But on a family day out to Chatham Dockyard I just had to ask where it was.

The answer is on a very dull piece of dock, in between HMS Gannet and the submarine HMS Ocelot. All lain out on the ground, surrounded by metal fencing, like a giant car boot sale. I actually passed the stuff twice before finding it - it just looks like a pile of marine scrap - which I guess in some respects it is.

One of the orange-boiler-suited chaps who show people round, told me that the Cutty Sark guys rang round all the dockyards looking for space. Most of it's here, but not all; it's in various places - some's even down in Portsmouth - which at least spreads the risk. And it is behind metal fence, and the whole site is locked at night. But somehow it just feels a bit - well - vulnerable, to me. After all, a chap in the Ropery on the same site said that a giant coil of 28" rope that was not even useful to HMS Ark Royal got half-inched this winter - and some of the Cutty Sark's parts are really quite small and must have 'souvenir' value...

But what I really find so odd about it all is that this is a museum with paying visitors - you'd think they'd make a bit more of it. There's no sign, no note on it to say that this pile of junk is part of possibly the most famous ship in the world. You'd think they'd cash in, give it a sign and perhaps have someone dedicated to showing visitors what there is and what's going on with it (complete with collecting box - they still have a few million to find...)

The guy (whom I had to seek out - he certainly wasn't hanging around the stuff) told me that work has been done on it - especially the cabins (not that you'd notice it just yet) and people are interested - when The Duke of Edinburgh came to unveil a sculpture he was far more interested in making them show him round the Cutty Sark stuff (hooray - a royal patron who actually cares about their cause...)


And I really think that everyday visitors (and Phantoms, natch) would want to see it too - as it is I'd say that 99% of them will be just walking straight past this right-royal jumble sale, without even noticing it. I mean - I know the Dockyard's being paid for it - but this isn't the Big Yellow Self Storage Company looking after a couple of old wardrobes and some skiing gear here - they're missing a trick. It's all in full view - and yet somehow it's invisible.


But whatever. The main thing is that it wasn't on board the ship in Greenwich last May. And for that I am grateful. And there seem to be chalk markings everywhere so that the jigsaw will go back together again easily:



One other interesting thing about Chatham Royal Dockyard for Greenwich-o-philes (apart from the Chatham Chest) is that the guy also told me the giant 18th Century brick-built Dockyard Foundry (which has to be 150m in length) and which is being restored now:

will, by 2010, house the National Maritime Museum's collection of model ships. Apparently whenever a new ship is built a model HAS to be made of it - and the NMM holds them all, currently in storage. We will be able to see them soon, thanks to a £13m lottery grant.

But don't leave it that long - do give Chatham a visit. The guy told me (before he got called away to deal with a double-parked steam engine - I kid you not) that very sunny days like these are generally quiet because everyone goes to the coast instead...

Lesnes Abbey

By the time the hangover had worn off yesterday, it was almost dark, but I didn't want to let the day go without doing anything some way useful - somehow it would have set a bad precedent for the year ahead. So we decided to try to find the abbey at Abbey Wood...

Lesnes was founded in 1178, eight years after the murder of Thomas a Becket, by one of the naughty boys who was involved. I can't tell whether Richard de Luci actually plunged the dagger into Becket's heart, or just held the big boys' coats while they did the dirty deed with the dirk, but he certainly felt bad enough about it to build an abbey in penance.

It was an Augustinian order, which, it would seem, mainly meant the Vatican's admin department. They did burials, baptisms, giving of penances - that kind of thing. The original Augustinians were pretty strict, but according to the sign-boards placed all over the site, this lot were more relaxed about the rules - presumably this translates that they were good-time monks.

They can't have been very good-time. They were always in financial trouble (though of course that could have been from being good-time monks, though it's politely implied it was more to do with constantly having to rebuild river defences) and by the time of the Dissolution, they were prime targets. Lesnes (do we pronounce this lez-nez, less-ness or even le-ney, French stylee?) was one of the first to cop it. Cardinal Wolsey strode in, the (presumably meagre) spoils intended for a new college he was building at Oxford.

Over the centuries the place was gradually plundered for building materials, but the foundations remain almost intact, giving a very pleasing layout map of what it would have been like. It's a sweet little place with all the necessary rooms you would expect in an abbey - a no-frills, EasyMonk monastery. A simple church with a raised altar and pillars, a cloister, somewhere to eat, somewhere to sit and and somewhere to ablute. The Abbot's own lodgings were next door to the bogs, not a layout I would have chosen, but maybe that was part of Richard de Luci's penance...

De Luci's great granddaughter, Roesia, was so fond of the abbey that she had her heart buried there. In a slightly icky-moment, the casket containing said heart was discovered in one of several archaeological digs and that, along with sundry bits of stone carvings, tiles and a monument are apparently in Greenwich Borough Museum - a place I haven't visited yet, its being situated most inconveniently in Plumstead, but which is definitely on my list for this year. Apparently there are also some finds in Erith Library, even less convenient, but I'll be making a trek out there too at some point.

In the meanwhile, despite it being almost dark yesterday afternoon and the place being virtually deserted, a little, non-vandalised, 'visitor centre' was open, with some faded photographs and info, which, along with close-cropped grass somehow made the whole place seem a little less abandoned.

I have to say that labelling this as a "day out" in itself might lead to a small amount of disappointment unless you are some kind of ruined-monastery nut, but as one of those things to do when you've, ahem, wasted most of the day but want to do something interesting, it's perfect.

Danson Stables

Have you ever had one of those Sundays where you're desperate to "go out" but don't have any real set plans? You know there are good places out there that you still haven't visited yet, but somehow the weather's not that great, your energy's not that high and besides - you're hungry?

That was us last weekend. I like to go out and do stuff but I'm not always quite as wired and targetted as I could be. "Let's go and find a nice country pub we've not already been to," we said, and set off with no plan at all in our heads.

This is always a bad thing. With theoretically all the time in the world, I reject places on the stupidest grounds. One pub is too noisy-looking, another is too rural. The next is too urban; I don't care for the windows-or the hanging baskets-or the 4x4s- or the local herberts in another. "But do they do food?" I whine about the next, "Yes, but it's family fun day" about the next (something I avoid at all costs.) And the weird thing is that the hungrier I get, the more pointlessly fussy I become.

We drove round and round - pretty much literally in circles until we had virtually decided to just come back to Greenwich or Blackheath, when it occurred to us to try the pub at Danson House

Danson Stables are just that - the old stable block, built just after 1800 from the remains of one of the wings of the house which had been demolished, all set in Capability Brown gardens - turned into a really not-bad-at-all pub. It's kept the compartmentalised feel - there are lots of different rooms so that it feels quite nice and cosy - it's a nice balance between bright and modern and traditional homely and a pleasant way to spend a lunchtime.

I get the feeling that this used to be a chain - there is something 'corporate' about the signage - but there is absolutely no indication of any kind of name, so I'm wondering whether it has been taken back into private ownership, just keeping the signs. A website I found said it was Bass, but it seemed out of date and I can't find anything about it anywhere else. I asked a waitress and she didn't know - a sure sign that there isn't any big corporate owner, I'd have said.

The food is predictable pub grub, but no less enjoyable for it. The portions are large - almost too large - and generally well-cooked. The gammon steak was huge and came with so much veg you couldn't see the plate. I suspect that my linguine had been made several hours beforehand and was the scrapings out of the the bottom of the pan - crispy and oily, but actually I confess I really enjoyed it - even the scrapy-bits. I felt sort of guilty for this since it was all the naughty oily cheesy sundried tomatoey bits and I should have complained - Gordon Ramsay would have had quite a lot to say about it - but frankly however 'old' it was, it was actually very yummy. So I have no taste. Shoot me.

There was music but it wasn't overbearing, the service was friendly and the beer not bad. Generally all good things.

As luck would have it there WAS a family fun day going on in the grounds of Danson House, but the pub itself was large enough to cope and despite there being lots of families it didn't encroach on us adult drinkers and the balance worked very well. The sheer number of people who had chosen to bring the kids indicates that the child portions are a hit.

I'd say this isn't a bad place to while away a Sunday lunchtime - just avoid the linguine if you don't get off on pan-scrapings. Me? I'd have exactly the same thing again...

James "Athenian" Stuart

1713-1788

V&A Museum - to 24th June 2007, admission free
The Old Royal Naval College Chapel

There is nothing quite like losing oneself in one of The Big London Museums on a dark, wet May afternoon. And the V&A is one of the best to lose oneself in because it's so full of twists and turns and dark Victorian corners filled with dark Victorian delights. Even better are the exhibitions - at the moment Surrealism and Kylie (complete with a costume by our own Johnny Rocket) are selling out, but I wasn't there for either of these big-hitters.

James "Athenian" Stuart may not trip off the tongue the way that contemporaries such as Robert Adam, Josiah Wedgewood and John Soane might, but his pioneering work in bringing neo-classicism to late 18th-century Britain is extraordinary and, along with all his great country piles and elegant townhouses, he found time to beautify Greenwich for us. It's taken over 200 years to create him a major exhibition, but at least now the V&A has done the right thing.

Born in London the son of a Scottish sailor, Stuart was not from wealthy stock. Things got worse when his father died and the family was plunged into poverty. He was apprenticed to a fan painter (I wonder if there are any of his efforts in the museum in Crooms Hill...?) but he longed for adventure. He decided to walk to Italy to learn about culture and architecture, antiquity and style. This was, after all, the beginning of the age of The Grand Tour. To start with he supported himself as an itinerant fan-painter (how much more romantic than working in the Rome branch of McDonald's during your gap-year, eh?)

James was doing okay in Italy, picking up the odd wealthy sponsor and portrait commission, but he craved more. He and his mate Nicholas Revett hitched down to Greece to really find out about the ancients and this was when James and Nick's Excellent Adventure began...

The pair of them had a whale of a time. Their sketchbooks still exist, showing them wearing Turkish robes, pretending to be Ottoman princes, clambering over precariously crumbling ruins making measurements and delighting in Local Colour. Stuart's sketches depict the minutiae of life - farmers toiling amongst vegetables - a friar blessing a diseased sheep - peasants escaping plague - and themselves - escaping the local law enforcement officers.

Only one of Stuart's own textbooks still exists - carefully annotated with corrections - he clearly didn't think much of its author, George Wheler - "It isn't a charger (in the statue's hand) but a shield from which he showereth down hail and tempests..." he writes. "He holdeth a conch shell," he points out exasperated at Wheler's erroneous description of another statue which claims "He holdeth nothing."

On his return to England, the pair published The Antiquities of Athens, Stuart revising the work, painting the illustrations and even designing the cover. A few copies of this massive tome still exist.

He didn't go straight from his adventures to grand design jobs. it took a while to get established, during which time he painted a backdrop for a school play - for Westminster School - and became the official portrait painter for the Society of Dilettanti (to which he and Nick had been elected some years before) but once he did, everyone (well all the nobs anyway) wanted him to design for them - everything from elegant furniture to splendidly frivolous garden temples to entire neo-classical palaces. Many of his palladian mansions have been demolished - and not that long ago - the 1960s were the worst culprits, it would seem (that's when the grand house at Belvedere was pulled down,) but there are a few left - notably at Shugborough in Shropshire, Earl Spencer's town gaff in Green Park and, on a different note entirely, our own chapel at Greenwich.

He had his critics - Horace Walpole described a closet at his Wimbledon Park stately home as "villainously painted" (though he later softened, describing a later offering as having a "noble, simple edifice" compared to a "harlequinnade" by Adam) but generally by this stage he could do nothing wrong.

He was given the prestigious job of Surveyor for the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich in 1758 and, after designing a few extremely ornate Admiralty Passes (sort of passports for ships - the fancier they were, the more easily British shipping passed through foreign waters) he got stuck in on the chapel. He made sure that there were lots of maritime images and impressive displays though it all got a bit damaged in a fire in 1779 after some rather raucous New Year celebrations in a tailor's shop above the church.

He also designed a three-tier pulpit, including a clerk's chair, reader's desk and 'preaching platform' in limewood with Corinthian columns and coadestone roundels(there goes that coadestone again...) A few years ago there was a great deal of excitement when the Reverend of All Saints Church in Belvedere looked a bit more closely at the pulpit that was bought in late Victorian times for a pound and thought it was by Stuart. Sadly it's unlikely, but you never know...

Stuart did other work in Greenwich, especially on the King's House and the Infirmary in between flitting around the country designing architectural baubles for the aristocracy. But by this point the bohemian lifestyle of his youth was catching up with him. He had married his 16 year old maidservant in his old age and they had five children in ten years which caused a bit of a scandal, and gout from alcoholism coupled with some chaotic business practices made him unreliable. He spent much of his later life drinking and playing skittles, dying in 1788.

The exhibition at the V&A, tucked away in an upstairs back room, is as elegant as Stuart's designs. It includes his early sketches, copies of his book, furniture and ornaments, as well as designs for and photographs of his best architectural designs. It's well worth a look. But if you don't make it to South Ken, a wander round the chapel in Greenwich, now beautifully restored, will lend some idea of the work of this underrated genius.

Hall Place

Bexleyheath, Kent

It's a traffic black spot. An unexciting post-war pub plonked gracelessly in the middle of a grisly intersection where the view consists of parked cars, pedestrian walkways and poplar trees. The pollution level hits "high" and the hard-shoulder is packed with overheated cars and their even hotter owners.

It’s a good bet that 99% of the stationary vehicles' occupants will not think beyond four-letter words when gazing across at the erstwhile Black Prince Public House (now a Holiday Inn,) much less that they will harbour romantic daydreams as to its name.

Which is a shame. For whilst they are staring gloomily across the road one way, they could take a break, turn off in the opposite direction, and two minutes from the hell that is the A2 find a heaven that is one of the great hidden treasures of London. A country estate that once entertained royalty - from the Prince of Wales to the medieval Black Prince himself...

Hall Place is all that remains of what was a flourishing enclave of wealthy Tudor social climbers, who saw the area around the River Cray as being the next up and coming area for literal gentrification. But whilst Woollett Hall and Mount Mascal, Foots Cray Place and Bourne Place have all gone the way of the world, Hall Place has survived, virtually untarnished, hidden from four lanes of traffic by nothing more than a few trees.

Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Champneis, saw his opportunity for redevelopment of an old 13th century house around 1537, and, reputedly appropriating some choice masonry from a local dissolved abbey, started a Great Hall. Following the classic style of the time it was exactly what it said - one giant hall that served all purposes.

His son, preferring a little (but frankly not much) more privacy, added wings to the Hall over the next few years and the family stayed there for over a century until it was sold to a wealthy London merchant, Robert Austen. By that time the black and white chequerboard effect of stone and flint that the house was built in was no longer fashionable, and it was extended using new-fangled bricks. To this day, the house has two distinct sides - the old black and white versus the new red brick, mellowed with age to an appealing patina.

Entering from the roundabout serving the A2, the first thing that strikes a visitor is the astonishing 18th Century wrought iron gates. Curling and scrolling, blacked and gilded, they provide a tantalising glimpse into the inner garden, and a first, exhilarating sight of the trademark chequerboard walls that make up the oldest parts of the house. The place looks as though it has been ripped up from the deepest rural countryside, and set down hap-hazardly into a random space between motorway and housing estate.

Within those gates, a timeless air of peace lures the visitor to seek some calm from his tarmac torpor. Turning into the grounds, however, the weary A2 escapee might be tempted to run for cover after all. A tiny car park, serving a restaurant, nursery and sports centre bustles with turnover - cars jostling for spaces that seem to have been reserved at birth.

A little perseverance pays off. The relief on wandering into the grounds of Hall Place is nigh-on palpable. The ancient stone seems to soak up, absorb, even, the modern stress and the pace drops to a saunter. Decisions are simple - and depend largely on nothing more sinister than the weather. To explore the award-winning formal gardens first - or to step through the stone entrance into the house itself before venturing further...

The sun is shining - for now - and the 63-hectare park beckons, the gentle murmur of the river Cray and the squabbling of Canada geese drowning out the now seemingly distant A2. With every turn something new beckons - a secret garden, a rose garden, a somewhat municipal-feeling but nevertheless delightful sunken garden. A turf maze - created for no particular reason other than it seemed a good idea at the time – appears beneath the feet and – for no particular reason other than it seems like a good idea at the time, the visitor feels compelled to follow it to its grassy centre without cheating or stepping on the cracks.

Of course, all this was just part of the estate before the 20th Century, and walking the land to the rear of the property, left more as it would have been, it is easy to imagine, lurking behind scrubs and shrubs, one of the estate’s less welcome visitors. For this area - a flood plain and hence undeveloped - was the gateway to Dover and then Europe. It was a favourite haunt of highwaymen, and the most notorious of all, Dick Turpin. It is unlikely, however, that his horse Black Bess managed to leap over the iron gates as local legend tells. They are 16 feet high.

Hall Place’s owner by that time was no stranger to notoriety himself. None other than the glorious 18th Century rake and scoundrel, Sir Francis Dashwood, had bought the house, though it is unclear as to whether he ever held any meetings of his saucy Hell Fire Club there. He spent most of his time raving it up at the family seat, West Wycombe Park and before long was just renting out Hall Place, as a school.

Keeping up the scandal-aspect, the last tenant of Hall Place was the colourful Lady Limerick. Living with her female "companion," she was a popular and gregarious local figure. She held lavish parties throughout the 1920s and 30s for the great and the good, including the Prince of Wales, the future George VI.

It was her idea to initiate the quite extraordinary topiary garden to the west of the house. She planted enormous "chess pieces," a concept that was taken to a quite bizarre degree during the 50s when a row of somewhat tubby heraldic "Royal Beasts" was planted to celebrate the coronation. What is remarkable is that whilst in virtually any other setting this could have been tacky in the extreme, somehow these chubby bits of hedgerow seem to fit and are delightful in their absurdity. Heaven only knows what the US servicemen who inhabited the place during the war on a secret code-breaking detail must have thought of giant chess pieces in their garden.

Immediately after the war, cheery locals happily wandered round Hall Place unchecked for some time. The reason for the property being left unlocked for so long only became clear relatively recently when a rather red-faced ex-GI came back on a visit, returning the giant iron key that he liberated along with the rest of Europe.

Inside, the house is still largely open-plan, as it was throughout the centuries. The great hall is surrounded by a balcony leading to the upper rooms and somehow it has escaped the fate of so many - being split into separate rooms for an easier domestic life. Lady Limerick removed many Victorian "additions" to the place, leaving it with an older feel than others of its age. There is a wonderful oak staircase and a minstrel's gallery.

In the older parts especially, it is easy to believe ghost stories of a wispy woman wringing her hands in grief for her husband’s demise by the White Tower (the top of which has been sealed off "to stop the ghosts," - not a method I've ever heard of working) spectral serving wenches searching for lost children in the corridors or even the Black Prince himself - whose sighting foretold dire news to the witness - but in reality no tales have ever been substantiated.

More tangible are the ghosts of the WWII airmen celebrated in a small exhibition upstairs; one that requests items from local people to create a permanent museum in the future. One local resident - an eleven year old fisherman - has already lent a sword that he found in the Cray dating back to Victorian times, but the appeal runs mainly to rather more mundane items - shrapnel, uniforms and other bits and pieces...

After a few more years languishing as a girls' school, Bexley Council took over and Hall Place is now run by a not-for-profit trust. Some concessions have had to be made - there is now an unexciting restaurant residing in the Jacobean barn - though at least it ensures that the stunning original rafters are being looked after and can be seen by the public.

The decor within the house itself is plain, and ever-so-slightly "civic;" possibly because it has found a new career as a venue for weddings, functions and conferences, though it retains its charm through simplicity.

There is an extensive nursery that feeds those enormous gardens, which is a revelation in itself to wander through. With a number of "model" gardens and display allotments, the nursery is inspirational without being evangelical.

Preparing to face reality once more, the visitor is again confronted with the prospect of the Black Prince. Could he really have wooed Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent within these grounds? Who cares? The A2 needs all the romance it can get...