24 Cheyne Row, SW3
Telephone: 020 7352 7087
This Queen Anne house was the home of the historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane, for nearly half a century. The house built in 1708 is in Cheyne Row, which is one of London's best preserved early eighteenth century streets.
The house is a typical terraced house of its time, an intimate, comfortable home where the Carlyles lived with their servant and received visitors such as Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and George Eliot. The house was opened to the public in 1895, just fourteen years after Carlyle's death and looks very much as it was when the Carlyles lived there. The rooms, still contain some of the Carlyles' furniture and furnishings, as well as their books, memorabilia, portraits and personal possessions. The small walled garden is open to visitors.
Carlyle himself described the house in a letter to his wife:
Eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very ceiling and all new painted and repaired, broadish stair with massive ballustrade in the old style, floors thick as rock, wood of them here and there worm-eaten yet capable of cleaness and still thrice of the strength of a modern floor.And then, as to rooms, goody, three storeys beside the sunk storey.
In the "sunk storey" was the kitchen with the well and old pump at which he drew water.
Admission fee charged
Open: Wed, Thurs and Fri 14.00-17.00 Sat-Sun and Bank Holidays 11.00-17.00 (April-Oct)
Nearest Tube/Underground Station: Sloane Square
