Chartwell Kent
Chartwell in the Kent Weald is the former country home of Sir Winston Churchill, the house in which Britain's most celebrated wartime leader lived from 1924 until a year before his death in 1965 and which he described as the most dearly loved of all the places where I have lived. The National Trust manages the house, which has been preserved largely as Churchill left it and provides the most direct and most personal experience of the domestic life, working habits and private character of one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century history.
The house retains Churchill's study, with his desk as he left it and his paintings on the wall, the dining room where political and artistic guests were entertained and the garden studio where he painted the landscapes that were his principal relaxation and in which he found the peace that political life denied him. The collection of his own paintings, displayed in the studio as he arranged them, provides an unexpected perspective on a man whose enormous public persona overshadowed a genuine artistic sensibility.
The garden was designed by Churchill himself and the brick walls he built in the garden, including the kitchen garden wall, were laid by his own hands in a practical engagement with the physical landscape that provided him with satisfaction and relaxation throughout his political career. The views from the garden over the Weald of Kent convey the quality of rural England that he fought to preserve and that he could see from his own windows throughout the years of the Second World War.