Small, but perfectly formed

SEEN from the Thames, Ham House is a mere impression of a building, a glimpse of red, the shadow of a chimney peeking from behind the trees that so irritated Horace Walpole. ‘The house was so blocked up with trees and gates that you think yourself a hundred miles off and a hundred miles back,’ he complained in 1770.

Despite the uneasy relationship some of Ham House’s owners had with the river, there is no doubt the villages of Ham and Petersham are inextricably entwined with both the Thames (there has been a settlement here since the upper Palaeolithic) and the estate itself, which at one time spanned 640 acres from Richmond to Kingston.

Originally built