Boston Manor House: A Jacobean Survivor in Brentford, Free to Visit

There is a Jacobean manor house sitting in a public park in Brentford, two minutes from the Piccadilly line and about four hundred metres from the M4, and it has one of the finest plaster ceilings in London. It is free. Most people in west London have no idea it is there, and for a long time they had an excuse, because it was shut.

Boston Manor House reopened in July 2023 after a long restoration, and I went on a cold, bright February morning when the park was half flooded, and there were about six of us in the whole building. This is the case for going.

Built by a Woman in 1622

The house went up in 1622 for Lady Mary Reade, a widow who had recently remarried and who had the money and the will to build a modern house on the manor of Boston. That matters, because the best thing in the building is a ceiling she chose, and it is signed with her initials and the date 1623.

From the 1670s, the house belonged to the Clitherow family, who held it for around two hundred and fifty years and extended and altered it in every generation, which is why it is now a tall brick box of Dutch gables with an early nineteenth century porch stuck on the front. In 1923 Brentford Urban District Council bought the house and about twenty acres around it, and opened the grounds as a public park the following year. The London Borough of Hounslow runs it now.

For decades it was the sort of building that gets described as a local asset and then quietly deteriorates. It ended up on the Heritage at Risk Register. The Boston Manor: Engaging the 21st Century project, backed by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and others, put that right, and the house came off the register when the work was done.

The Ceiling

Go straight up to the State Drawing Room. The ceiling there has been called the high watermark of Jacobean elaboration and, standing under it, that does not feel like an overstatement.

It is a deep grid of moulded plaster ribs, every compartment filled with emblems and every emblem meaning something. Lady Mary chose the programme herself: the four Elements, the Five Senses, War and Peace, Faith, Hope and Charity. Some of the labels are in Latin and some in English, and her initials and the date 1623 are worked in with the rest. It is a woman setting out, in plaster, what she thought the world was made of, and it has been sitting over that room for four hundred years.

The chimneypiece under it is just as good and even more specific. The plaster overmantel is copied from a 1584 engraving by Abraham de Bruyn, with a central medallion of Abraham and Isaac and the angel, and the caption beneath it reads, in the mount of the Lord it shall be seene.

The room around it is now hung in a deep blue damask with white woodwork, which makes the white plaster read almost like carved ivory. There are gilt girandoles on the walls with real candles in them. It is worth standing in each corner in turn, because the ceiling changes completely depending on which way the light crosses it.

How to Read a Jacobean Ceiling

Ceilings like this were the most expensive thing you could put in a house in the 1620s, and they were meant to be read rather than just admired. Plaster was worked wet, in place, by specialist craftsmen using carved wooden moulds for the repeating elements and modelling the figures freehand, which is why the ribs are so crisp and the little scenes are all slightly different.

The programme at Boston Manor is unusually legible once you know what you are looking for. Work along the compartments and you will find the four Elements, earth, air, fire and water; the Five Senses, each as a small figure with an attribute; War and Peace facing each other; Faith, Hope and Charity; and a panel for Tune, which is the one nobody expects. Some panels are labelled in Latin, some in English, and the inconsistency is part of the charm: this was a house, not a cathedral.

Practical advice for actually seeing it. Do not stand in the middle and crane. Start at one end of the room, look along the ceiling at a shallow angle so the light catches the sides of the mouldings, then walk slowly to the other end and look back. The relief reads far better across the room than straight up. If you have a phone, the panorama mode pointed at the ceiling is the only way most people get the whole thing in one frame, and it is worth the two seconds of looking ridiculous.

And take the guidebook or the room sheet. Half the pleasure here is identifying a figure holding a mirror and realising you are looking at Sight, put there in 1623 by a woman who wanted her drawing room to be about how people understand the world.

The Staircase, the Lion and the Painted Ruins

The other thing I did not expect is the stairwell. The staircase rises through the middle of the house, and the newel post at the bottom is topped with a carved wooden lion, one of a pair added by James Clitherow in the early nineteenth century along with the porch and the hall screen. It is a slightly comic animal, gold and upright and very pleased with itself, and it is the first thing that makes the house feel like somebody's home rather than an exhibit.

The walls of the stairwell are covered in a scenic paper of classical ruins: broken arches, columns, trees, figures wandering among fallen stone, all in sepia and grey, running the full height of the house. Looking up from the bottom step you get flights of stairs cutting across painted ruins with daylight coming in from the big window, and it is the best photograph in the building after the ceiling.

That window is worth a moment too. There is a deep seat under it, the park beyond, and on the return of the wall the same painted ruins carry on, so you sit inside a picture looking out at Brentford.

The Rest of the House

There is a red room with a square piano standing in the window, with a polite sign asking you not to play it, which everybody reads and obeys and slightly resents.

There are more moulded ceilings in the rooms off the drawing room, a hall with the Clitherow screen, and a set of interpretation that is unusually good: the restoration made a point of telling the story of the people who worked in the house as well as the family who owned it, and of where the money came from, which in the case of a family with West India connections is not a comfortable history and is not dodged.

It is not a big house. You can see all of it in forty five minutes, which is exactly why it is such a good thing to have on a Saturday: no obligation, no queue, no fatigue.

Boston Manor Park

The park is the other half of the visit, and it is free and open all the time. There is a long lake in front of the house with swans and coots on it, fed by the Brent, and a line of enormous cedars of Lebanon that predate almost everything except the house itself.

In February it was doing the thing that flat London parkland does well in winter: bare branches, low sun, water the colour of pewter, and the brick house sitting up on its rise at the far end with the gables showing through the trees. It is the best view of the building, and it costs nothing, and you can get it even on days when the house is closed.

Be warned that the ground near the water floods, so wear something sensible in winter. There is also a cafe in the park, and the towpath of the Grand Union Canal is a short walk away if you want to keep going.

Visiting Boston Manor House: Practical Notes

Address: Boston Manor Road, Brentford, London TW8 9JX.

Getting there: Boston Manor station on the Piccadilly line is about five minutes' walk, which makes this one of the easiest historic houses in London to reach without a car. Brentford Overground station is around fifteen minutes away, and the E8 bus stops nearby. There is very limited parking, so use the tube.

Cost: free to go into the historic rooms. Donations welcome. Some ticketed events and performances use the State Drawing Room, which occasionally closes it to general visitors, so check before you go if the ceiling is the whole reason for your trip.

Opening: usually six days a week, broadly from midday to late afternoon, with the park open all the time. Hours have changed since reopening, so look them up rather than turning up on a hunch.

Best time to go: a bright winter weekday, when the low sun rakes across the plasterwork, and you will have the drawing room to yourself. Late spring is better for the park and the cedars.

How long to allow: forty-five minutes to an hour in the house, plus half an hour walking round the lake. It combines very well with an afternoon further west or with the canal.

If you like buildings like this, London has a run of them hiding behind unpromising doors: Ham House is the grander seventeenth century version upriver, and the Maughan Library, the British Academy and the Law Society's hall on Chancery Lane are all worth chasing, though those last three mostly open for one weekend a year.

Boston Manor House is the best free forty-five minutes in west London. Go for the ceiling, stay for the lion, and walk round the lake on the way out.

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