Eltham Palace

Listen first to the gravel under your feet. Then look ahead to the old stone bridge across a still green moat. Ducks drift on the water. Behind the bridge rise two buildings that should not belong together. One is a medieval hall of pale stone and dark timber. The other is a smooth brick house from the 1930s, all clean lines and tall windows. Welcome to Eltham Palace, in the quiet southeast of Greater London. This place holds two lives in one: a royal home of the Middle Ages, and a private house from the age of jazz.

The bridge itself is a good place to begin. It is medieval, and it still carries visitors over the moat as it once carried kings and their servants. Pause on it for a moment. The moat tells you that this was never just a country house. It was a defended royal residence, a place where English monarchs came to rest, to hunt, and to keep Christmas away from the noise of the capital. In the late Middle Ages, Eltham was one of the largest royal palaces in England, larger in some periods than Hampton Court would later be.

The royal story starts in the early fourteenth century. A powerful bishop, Antony Bek, held the manor and passed it to the future King Edward the Second. From then on, Eltham stayed in royal hands for centuries. Kings added rooms, gardens, and lodgings. Wide hunting parks spread across the land around the palace, where deer were kept for the royal hunt. Today, the suburbs of London surround the site. But try to picture fields and woods running to the horizon, with London a day's ride away.

Now turn to the great stone hall. This is the Great Hall, built for King Edward the Fourth in the 1470s. It is the largest surviving part of the medieval palace. Step inside if you can, and look up. Above you is a hammerbeam roof — a style of English carpentry where short beams project from the walls to carry the weight of the roof. The effect is a forest of carved oak floating overhead. This was a room for feasts, for music, and for displaying royal power to every guest who entered.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Eltham was a childhood home of the young Henry the Eighth. In 1499, the Dutch scholar Erasmus came here with Thomas More. They met the royal children, and Henry was then a boy of about eight. Erasmus later wrote about the meeting. It is strange to think of that famous, difficult king as a child in these rooms, receiving a visit from the leading thinker of his age. Some of the old palace walls you see around the grounds date from that Tudor world.

But the palace's royal life did not last. The Tudors came to prefer Greenwich, which sat beside the river and was easier to reach by boat. Eltham slowly fell out of favour. During and after the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, much of the palace was damaged or taken down. For a long time the site became farmland. Remarkably, the Great Hall survived because it had a practical use. It served as a barn. Hay and farm carts filled the space where kings once dined.

The second life of Eltham begins in 1933. Stephen and Virginia Courtauld took a lease on the site. Stephen came from a wealthy textile family, and the couple were collectors, travellers, and generous patrons of the arts. They restored the Great Hall and asked the architects Seely and Paget to build a new house beside it. The result joins medieval stone to a modern home. From the outside, the new wing echoes the brick of nearby Hampton Court, yet inside it was one of the most modern homes in the country.

Walk into the entrance hall and the change is complete. It is a round room under a wide glass dome, and daylight falls softly onto pale wood. The room was designed by the Swedish designer Rolf Engströmer. The walls are covered in marquetry, which means pictures made from small pieces of different coloured wood. Look closely and you will find figures and buildings from Italy and Scandinavia. The light, the curved walls, and the warm wood make this room feel like the lobby of an elegant ocean liner.

The Courtaulds loved new technology, and the house shows it. They had a central vacuum cleaning system, with sockets in the walls for the hoses. There was a loudspeaker system to play music through the ground floor. Electric clocks and concealed lighting were part of the design. In the 1930s these were rare luxuries. For the guests who came to parties here, the house must have felt like a view into the future, built beside a hall from the age of knights.

Now for the most loved resident of Eltham. The Courtaulds kept a ring-tailed lemur named Mah-Jongg, usually called Jongy. According to the family story, he came from the department store Harrods. Jongy had his own heated quarters upstairs, with walls painted to look like a bamboo forest. He could move between floors through a special route. Staff and guests had mixed feelings about him, because he was said to bite people he disliked. Many visitors leave Eltham remembering the lemur more than the kings.

Upstairs, look for Virginia Courtauld's bathroom. The walls are lined with golden onyx, a smooth, glowing stone. The bath sits in a niche, with gold-plated taps and a small statue above it. It shows how the couple used rich materials with a modern eye. Nearby rooms carry fine fitted furniture and leather panels. Each room has its own colour and mood. Walking through them, you feel the confidence of the years between the two world wars, just before everything changed.

That change came with the Second World War. Bombs fell near the palace during the Blitz, and the Great Hall roof was damaged. In 1944, the Courtaulds left Eltham. After them, army education units used the buildings for many decades. Later, the charity English Heritage took over the care of the site. It restored the 1930s interiors, using old photographs to bring back the furniture and fittings. That careful work is the reason you can see the house today much as the Courtaulds knew it.

Before you leave, walk through the gardens. Follow the edge of the moat, where old stone walls drop straight into the water. Look back at the house, and notice how the medieval hall and the modern wing sit side by side under one roofline. Listen for the birds, the soft splash of a duck, the distant hum of London. Two very different worlds share this small island of land. As you cross the bridge again, you walk the same stones that kings walked — and so did one curious lemur's owners.