Jimi Hendrix's Flat in Mayfair: Inside Handel Hendrix House

There is a top-floor flat on a Mayfair street where the bed is covered in a pink and red spread, the curtains are turquoise. There are Persian rugs layered three deep on the floor, an embroidered shawl over the canopy, ostrich feathers on the mantelpiece, a rubber rat somewhere in the room and a guitar lying on the bed. Jimi Hendrix lived here for about eighteen months and called it the only home he ever had.

Through the wall, George Frideric Handel lived for thirty-six years and died in his bed in 1759. The two houses are now one museum, and it is the strangest and most affecting small museum in London. Here is what is in it and how to visit.

Two Men, Two Hundred Years, One Wall

Handel took 25 Brook Street in 1723 and was its first-ever tenant. He stayed until he died there on 14 April 1759. Almost everything he is famous for was written in that house: Messiah, Zadok the Priest, Alcina, Ariodante, Solomon, the Music for the Royal Fireworks. He became a British subject in 1727 and kept harpsichords, a clavichord and a chamber organ in the rooms.

Two hundred and nine years later, in the summer of 1968, Jimi Hendrix moved into the top floor of number 23 next door with his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham. She had found the flat through a newspaper advertisement. The rent was thirty pounds a week, and there was a restaurant downstairs called Mr Love. They stayed until some point in 1969.

The blue plaques are one of the best pairings in London, and the order of them is not what you would guess. Handel was commemorated first, back in 1875, though that plaque had faded to illegibility and was replaced in 1952. Hendrix's plaque went up in 1997, unveiled by Noel Redding and Pete Townshend with Hendrix's father, Jimmy Page, and Ray Davies there.

The Handel plaque you see now is actually the newest of the lot. It dates from 2001, corrects the spelling to Frideric, and was deliberately repositioned lower down the wall so that it lines up horizontally with the Hendrix one.

Inside Jimi Hendrix's Flat

The recreated bedroom is the centrepiece, and it is uncanny. It was rebuilt from period photographs, from Kathy Etchingham's own recollections, and from tracking down around seventy items of original furniture and fittings. The result is not a shrine and not a set. It looks like a room somebody has just walked out of.

Things to look for. The canopy of fringed fabric over the bed.

The fireplace, with an oval mirror above it, ostrich feathers in a vase, a pair of lampshades in a yellow flower print, and an enormous number of rugs. The mantelpiece clutter: a BOAC flight bag, a telephone with a dial, a hat, a cracked glass demijohn. The record collection on the shelves, which runs from blues and jazz through Ravi Shankar and rock to the Bee Gees, is a far more interesting document than any guitar. His Epiphone FT79 acoustic sits in a case.

The domestic details are what get you. He drank milky PG Tips. He watched Coronation Street, which he liked precisely because it was so alien to an American. Mateus Rosé and Löwenbräu cooled on the window ledge, there were Quality Street in a tin and Benson & Hedges in a shell-shaped ashtray. And being an ex-paratrooper, he made the bed with immaculate hospital corners.

They deliberately did not install a doorbell, so that nobody could get to them.

Everything Came From John Lewis

This is my favourite fact about the flat, and it demolishes about half of what people assume. The room reads as Moroccan, Turkish, psychedelic, exotic. It was furnished from John Lewis on Oxford Street, ten minutes' walk away, with additions from Liberty and bits picked up from markets. The famous turquoise curtains came from John Lewis. Hendrix and Etchingham chose them together, in a department store, like anyone else.

There is something very cheering about that. The most 1969 room in Britain was assembled on a Saturday afternoon on Oxford Street. The clothes are the other draw. A rail hung with 1960s pieces including a braided military tunic of the kind he made his own, in front of a tall sash window, with wig heads along the top of the rail.

In another room a leather armchair with a paisley throw over the arm, a turquoise telephone on a spindly side table, candles on the mantelpiece. If you have ever wondered what the psychedelic era actually looked like at close range rather than in photographs, this is it, and it is smaller and more domestic than you imagine.

The Handel Records

Hendrix knew he was living next to something. He had seen the blue plaque on the wall between the two houses, which was positioned in such a way that he thought Handel had lived in his house. Delighted, he went out and bought his own copies of Messiah and the Water Music and played them in the flat.

Asked by a journalist what he thought of his famous neighbour, he replied that he had not heard much of the fella's stuff. It is, I think, the perfect quote, and it is written on a wall in the museum.

The coincidence is better than it first appears. Two foreign musicians, an immigrant from Halle and an immigrant from Seattle, both in their twenties or thirties when they arrived. Both making their careers in London, both living on the same fifty feet of Mayfair street. This is the only Hendrix residence preserved anywhere in the world, and it was the first historic house museum in London devoted to a rock musician.

The Handel Half, and What Changed in 2023

Do not skip next door. The Handel rooms are furnished from the inventory of his possessions taken in 1759, with Georgian architectural features sourced from neighbouring properties, and they are beautifully plain: panelling, muted colours, a harpsichord, a bed. The rehearsal and performance room is where the music actually happened, and there is very often somebody playing in it.

The Handel House Museum opened in November 2001, the result of a campaign that had rumbled on since the late 1950s and a Heritage Lottery grant that bought the lease. The Hendrix flat opened to the public on 10 February 2016 after a restoration backed by a 1.2 million pound Heritage Lottery grant within a 2.4 million pound project.

Then in September 2021 the whole thing closed for a three million pound overhaul and reopened in May 2023 as Handel Hendrix House. Three things changed. It took over the ground-floor shop unit, so instead of an easily missed door there is now a proper visible entrance. The Georgian basement kitchen was restored.

And more of the Hendrix flat opened up, including a small room up a previously blocked-off stair, used by people staying with him and reportedly freezing cold. It now holds a Marshall amplifier and a framed photograph by the window.

Music, Which Is Rather the Point

This is a museum about two musicians and it programmes accordingly, which is unusual and worth planning around.

Included with admission: talks every Thursday at two, live music roughly twice a month under the excellent name Baroque and Roll, and tours on selected Sundays at two.

Ticketed separately: Saturday Guitar Days, the Handel's Salon recital series, and The Jimi Sessions. There is also a children's concert series, Georgian cooking weekends and a Christmas programme.

Hearing a countertenor in Handel's rehearsal room, or a guitarist playing Hendrix repertoire in a flat the size of a studio apartment, is a very different experience from reading a label. Check the what's on page before you pick your day.

Visiting Jimi Hendrix's Flat: Practical Notes

📍 Address: Handel Hendrix House, 25 Brook Street, Mayfair, London W1K 4HB. The Hendrix flat is next door at number 23 and you go between them inside.

⏰ Opening: Wednesday to Sunday, ten until five, with last entry at four. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays, though groups can book on those days.

🎫 Tickets: adults 14.50, students 10.50, ages thirteen to seventeen five pounds, under-twelves free with a family group, carers free, and free for National Art Pass holders. Ten per cent off for groups of ten to twenty. Booking is not compulsory but capacity is limited, so book ahead if you are making a special trip.

🚇 Getting there: Bond Street is the nearest tube and it is a short, flat walk. Oxford Circus and Marble Arch are both walkable. There is step-free access to the building and accessible parking on Grosvenor Street.

⏳ How long to allow: an hour to an hour and a half, two if there is music on.

Photography: there is no published policy that I could find, so ask at the desk on arrival rather than assuming.

🗺️ Nearby: you are on the edge of Bond Street, two minutes from Claridge's and five from Oxford Street, and Mercato Mayfair is a converted church full of food stalls ten minutes north. If you like a preserved house where somebody's life is left lying about, Sambourne House and Leighton House in Kensington are the two best in London.

Jimi Hendrix's flat is a room with a bedspread, some curtains from a department store and a guitar on the bed, and it will stay with you far longer than that description suggests. Go on a Thursday and stay for the talk.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.