Places to Visit in South London - Hall Place

A while back, towards the tail-end of my summer break, I went to the borough of Bexley for the first time in my life. I never got around to blogging about it due to writer's block, but in retrospect it was a cool experience, and I'd like to share some photos from the trip.

 

This is Hall Place, a mansion which was built in 1537 for the then Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Champneys. Most of the building materials were taken from the nearby Lesnes Abbey monastery, forming the greyish exterior of part of the house. I say "part", because the rest is a delightful brick red, which was built much later, in 1649 under the ownership of Sir Robert Austen, who was a local merchant. Hall Place remained a home for various different wealthy families up until 1943; in 1944, the US Army set up an intercept station here, where Signal Corps worked on the Enigma code breaking mission by intercepting messages from the German Luftwaffe. 

 

Today, the building is managed by the Bexley Heritage Trust, and is free to visit. You can only go inside if you go on a prebooked tour, though, and as I merely turned up without any forward planning, I didn't. But that's not to say you can only gawk at the house for hours on end.

There are also the wonderful gardens which you can easily spend hours just looking at, all 65 hectares worth. There's the topiary, for example, that depicts the Queen's beasts, which were created for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, which are magnificent in scale. 

   

There's also the River Cray, which flows through the gardens, downstream from its mouth near Crayford, and you can spend a while looking at the swans and relaxing.  

I was most intrigued by the butterfly gardens, which are somewhat of a rare sight in south London. Indeed, this is the London Butterfly Garden, I don't believe there are any others in the city, and that makes Bexley far cooler than I thought it was. It opened in the summer of 2024, too, so here's your chance to visit something relatively new and brag about it to everyone you know.

   

The gardens aren't particularly the largest, I only spent twenty minutes inside the humid glasshouse, and I'm not sure if the £7 I spent were worth it in the end. The butterflies, you won't be surprised to hear, don't flock towards you, rather they spend their time amongst plants and nectar-filled pools, so it's also extraordinarily hard to get any photos of them, unless you're willing to risk scaring one away. 

   

It's not like I was going right at them, obviously - they even tell you to not scare the butterflies when you go in. It was moreso a matter of adjusting my camera to get a picture of them, and I'm happy with the results. On the whole, I'm glad I gave the gardens a shot.

   

Other attractions in the Hall Place gardens include the Jambs Owls, where you go up close to, and even get to hold, owls. It's closed right now, it being winter and all, but reopens around March time. I didn't give this one a shot because I have a slight fear of owls. 

There's also the miniature railway, open during spring and summertime on Sundays. It was closed when I visited, it being a Friday, but you can see the vacant tracks and what it might look like when you visit.

   

That's as much as I have to say about Hall Place, really. It's a wonderful place worth visiting, especially when it gets warmer and everything is open. The butterfly gardens especially are worth it!

 

Bexley admin

Bexley is the only borough in south London that I'd never visited before I went on this trip, and at the time it was also one of the few boroughs I'd never blogged about. (In fact, as of today, I have one unblogged borough left, but by next month that won't be an issue.)

Bexley station

You might expect me to have more to say about Bexley itself, but I don't. I did walk very briefly around Bexley village, but that was only to get to the bus stop from the train station. I am certain Bexley itself has a lot to see - hell, Hall Place is possibly up there amongst one of the coolest places I've been to this side of the river  - but I'm yet to find out for sure.

Either way, it is a bit odd that it's taken this long for a blog series about places to visit in south London has only just made it to Bexley. But it has.