Great Maytham Hall

Great Maytham Hall stands in the rolling countryside of Kent, a Grade II* listed country house near the village of Rolvenden. The present building was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1909–12 for the Liberal politician H. J. Tennant, who restored the original name Great Maytham. Before Lutyens rebuilt it, the house had been largely destroyed by fire in 1893, though parts of the 18th-century laundry and stables still survive. During the Second World War the hall briefly housed the Royal Normal College for the Blind, which moved again under threat of invasion. After the war the building fell into disrepair until the Country Houses Association bought it in 1961 and converted it into fifteen flats. The house is best known for its gardens, which inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden. Burnett lived at Great Maytham from 1898 to 1907 and restored the overgrown walled garden, discovering a hidden door beneath the ivy. She planted hundreds of roses and wrote several books in a gazebo set among the terraces. Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll reshaped the grounds in their characteristic style, adding terraced lawns and parkland. During the war the army requisitioned the estate and replaced the roses with vegetables as part of the Dig for Victory campaign. A German bomb cratered the lawn, and after the war the gardens were left neglected for years. Visitors today find a quiet country estate where history is still visible. The 18th-century wings of the house remain, while the main block shows Lutyens’s red-brick rebuilding. The walled garden, though altered, still holds the spirit of Burnett’s creation, with roses and old paths. The surrounding parkland carries the marks of wartime allotments and the wartime bomb’s crater. A war memorial designed by Lutyens stands nearby, linking the house to its wartime role. The flats inside the hall share grand reception rooms, keeping the scale of a stately home.