Hall Place and Danson House, Bexley

Published 28 September 2026 · By the Guide to London editorial team · Editor: Terje Moy

Bexley has two Grade I houses a mile and a half apart, and neither is a building you can simply walk into. Hall Place, the Tudor house of chequered flint and stone, opens its historic rooms only to pre-booked guided tours; its gardens are free every day of the year. Danson House, the Palladian villa in Danson Park, opens its principal floor free on about five Sundays a year between April and August, and the last of the 2026 dates was 23 August.

That is the opposite of what most guides imply. Both estates are worth the journey, but for the gardens, the parkland and one specific wartime story rather than for the interiors, unless you have looked up a date and booked. Both are in the London Borough of Bexley, in the far south-east, on Southeastern trains out of Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Victoria, and you can do both in a day on one ticket because everything is inside the London fare zones.

Hall Place: the house is closed, the gardens are not

Hall Place states it on its own homepage: the historic house, although not open to the general public, can be pre-booked for guided tours only. Everything else on the site is free, all year.

Those hours need care, because the site publishes three different winter closing times in three different places. From April to September the gardens open at 9am and close at 9.30pm, with the Stone Arch Gate that leads to the glasshouses and Visitor Centre shutting at 5.45pm. For October to March the figures given are variously 5.15pm, 5pm and 4pm on different pages of the same website. Treat the winter afternoon as short, aim to be finished by four, and telephone 0203 045 4088 if a long journey depends on it. The Visitor Centre and the riverside cafe open 9.30am to 4.30pm, and both shut over Christmas and New Year.

What the Tudor house is made of, and the abbey rubble

Hall Place is two houses stuck together, and once you see that, the building makes sense from the outside.

The northern half is sixteenth-century and half-H in plan, built by the Champneys family on the site of an older building. Its north front is faced with a chequer pattern of stone and flint, with a central basket-arched doorway in a moulded stone surround, flanked by tall canted bays of eight lights each rising the full height of the building. The west front is chequerwork too, with an octagonal chequered turret at the south end. The east front is different again: stone rubble and flints set in galleting, with four small rectangular projections that look like chimney breasts, some of which really are flues and end in twin diamond-plan stacks.

The southern half was added late in the seventeenth century and forms a hollow square in red brick, two storeys and an attic under a tiled roof. Its south front has ten ground-floor sashes set in brick arcading with stone keystones, ten more above with their glazing bars intact, and five pedimented dormers. Inside the courtyard, the sixteenth-century wing shows as a red brick tower of four storeys with an octagonal lantern on top.

The story you will hear locally is that the flint and stone came from a dissolved monastery. The statutory list description does not say so: it records only that the house was built by the Champneys family on the site of an older building, and describes the chequerwork and the galleted rubble without attributing an origin. Treat the abbey as a strong local tradition rather than a documented fact. The surviving ruins of the abbey usually named in the story are at Lesnes Abbey Woods, four miles north, reachable from Abbey Wood on the Elizabeth line.

Inside, according to the list entry, the sixteenth-century wings each have one long panelled room on the ground floor, reached by a cross passage with timber-framed walls; a central doorway leads into the great hall, which has a flat ribbed ceiling; and two upper rooms in the west wing have elaborate plaster ceilings, the southernmost of them, with a stone fireplace, having been the chapel. None of that is visible without a tour.

Codename Santa Fe: the reason to book the tour

Hall Place has a twentieth-century history that is better than its Tudor one, and it is the subject of the curator's tour. During the Second World War the house was used for top-secret signals work as part of Operation Ultra: American soldiers stationed here, under the code name Santa Fe, intercepted encoded German messages around the clock. The exhibition galleries display veterans' memories and declassified files about it, and the curator-led tour walks you through the rooms where the work was done. A second tour covers how each owner changed the building since the sixteenth century; the galleries also hold Bexley museum collection objects going back to prehistoric and Roman times.

Both tours are the same price. Private group tours cost £9 per person with a minimum of 25 people, booked by email or telephone; Thursday to Sunday tours can be booked up to two months ahead, Monday to Wednesday up to four. Public tour dates are announced individually rather than on a fixed timetable, which is why there is no schedule here. For the codebreaking story on a scale you can see any day, our guides to the Churchill War Rooms and the Imperial War Museum are the central London alternatives.

What else is at Hall Place, and what it costs extra

The estate also warns that private events, photography and filming sometimes close parts of the house and garden, and recommends telephoning in advance if you are coming a long way or want to see something specific.

Danson House: a Palladian villa that was nearly lost

Danson House is the more architecturally serious of the two, and it has the better rescue story. It was built for Sir John Boyd in 1766 for his second wife, Catherine Chapone, and designed by Sir Robert Taylor, whom Bexley credits as architect of the Bank of England.

By the twentieth century it was close to ruin. In 1995 English Heritage identified it as the most significant building at risk in London, which began a decade of restoration. Queen Elizabeth II formally reopened the house in July 2005, the first time the interior had been open to the public in thirty years.

It is now the official Register Office for the London Borough of Bexley, run by Kent County Council on Bexley's behalf. That arrangement keeps the house in use and is also why its public opening is so narrow: weddings, citizenship ceremonies, renewals of vows and the registration of births and deaths all happen here. On a Saturday morning you may well find a wedding party on the steps.

Danson's five Sundays, and the month that matters

Bexley Council publishes the heritage opening dates, and they are few. Tours of Danson House are offered to the public between April and August only. In 2026 the dates were Sunday 26 April, Sunday 24 May, Sunday 28 June, Sunday 26 July and Sunday 23 August. On each of those days the principal floor was free from 10am to 12pm, with a guided tour at 12pm costing £8 per person, payable by card only, booked in advance by email to the heritage team.

Two consequences follow. If you are reading this between September and March, the house is shut and there is nothing to book. And the 2027 dates were not published as of late September 2026, so the pattern above is the best guide: expect one Sunday a month from April, and check Bexley Council's Danson House page before planning a trip around it.

Danson Park itself is open 24 hours a day, every day, and is a registered Grade II landscape of 80.7 hectares with a lake at the centre. The stables beside the house are separately listed at Grade II*, and there is a separately managed tea room at the back of the house. 2025 was the park's centenary; the charter oak that stands between the house and the lake is old enough to have watched all of it.

Doing both in one day

The one-day version that works best: Danson House first if it is one of the open Sundays, because the free window shuts at noon, then Danson Park, then a bus to Bexley and the Hall Place gardens in the afternoon. On any other day, do Hall Place properly and treat Danson as a walk in a park with a good house in the middle of it.

Eating at either

Both estates have places to eat, and all of them hold the top hygiene rating. At Hall Place, the Riverside Cafe was rated 5 on 17 March 2026 and the Miller and Carter steakhouse 5 on 9 June 2025. In Danson Park, the Boathouse was 5 on 22 December 2025, Danson Stables 5 on 9 May 2025 and the park kiosk 5 on 11 September 2026. Those ratings can be checked on the Food Standards Agency's public register; we do not link to venues' own sites. Picnics are fine at Hall Place; barbecues and gazebos are not.

Which to choose if you only have one afternoon

Choose Hall Place. The gardens are better, they are open every day, there is more on the site, and the walled garden and glasshouses give you something to look at in winter when Danson is shut. Choose Danson only if you have one of its five Sundays and can be there before noon, in which case you get a first-rate Georgian interior for nothing.

Our guide to Morden Hall Park and south London's estates puts both of these in the wider set of free borough-run estates, and Bexleyheath and Erith covers the area they sit in. The one unmissable house in the same borough is the Red House, William Morris's own home, half a mile from Danson Park, which works as a third stop on a Bexley day if you have booked its tour in season.

Further afield in the same direction, Crossness Pumping Station is the great Victorian interior of outer south-east London, Eltham Palace is the royal house with the famous Art Deco rooms, and Charlton House is the Jacobean house you can walk into free without booking anything at all. Valence House and the museums of outer London covers the borough museums, and our list of free things to do in London has the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Can you go inside Hall Place in Bexley?

Only on a pre-booked guided tour. Hall Place states on its own website that the historic house is not open to the general public and can be booked for guided tours only. The gardens, Visitor Centre, Stables Art Gallery and cafe are free and open all year without booking.

Is Danson House free to visit?

The principal floor is free, but only from 10am to 12pm on a handful of published Sundays between April and August. In 2026 those were 26 April, 24 May, 28 June, 26 July and 23 August. The 12pm guided tour on the same days costs £8, card only, booked ahead by email. Danson Park is free and always open.

How do you get to Hall Place from central London?

Take a Southeastern train from Charing Cross, Cannon Street or Victoria to Bexley station, which is inside the London fare zones, then walk about 21 minutes. Enter and leave through the main Stone Arch Gate. By car, the entrance is on Bourne Road, DA5 1PQ, just off the A2.

Can you take a dog to Hall Place?

No. Bexley's byelaws prohibit dogs, along with footballs, fishing, cycling, barbecues and drones, and domestic pets are not permitted within the walled grounds. Registered assistance animals are the only exception. Danson Park, by contrast, is an ordinary public park.

Sources

• Historic England - Hall Place, list entry 1188277 (Grade I) (checked September 2026)
• Historic England - Danson Park Mansion, list entry 1064225 (Grade I) (checked September 2026)
• Historic England - Danson Park, register of parks and gardens, list entry 1000211 (Grade II) (checked September 2026)
• London Borough of Bexley - Danson House: heritage tours, opening dates and location (checked September 2026)
• Hall Place and Gardens (Bexley Council) - Opening times and tickets (checked September 2026)
• Hall Place and Gardens - Guided tours, including Codename Santa Fe (checked September 2026)
• Food Standards Agency register - Riverside Cafe and Miller and Carter at Hall Place DA5 1PQ; the Boathouse, Danson Stables and Danson Park Kiosk at Danson Park DA6 8HL (checked September 2026)