Further information: Title is Local Lore No. 3; title on copy is Around & About Bexley.

Further information regarding the Mansion House and gardens:

Hall Place replaced an earlier medieval manor house, which is likely to have stood on the same site. The manor dated to at least AD 814 but is first mentioned in the 13th century. The current building incorporates medieval carved stone. It was built in 1537-40 by Sir John Champenois, a merchant who held the position of Lord Mayor of London in 1534. It was altered and enlarged by his son, Justinian who inherited the property in 1556. Robert Austen, a London merchant knighted in 1660, extended the southern part of the house in red brick. Hall Place remained in the Austen family until 1772 when the estate passed to Sir Francis Dashwood.

(Dashwood’s main country seat is West Wycombe –renowned for a very sexual 18thc garden – he also founded the Hellfire Club in the grotto like caves on the estate)

The Dashwood family owned the estate for the next 150 years and during some of this time let the house out as a private school. From c 1870 the property was let to a series of tenants, the last of whom was the Countess of Limerick who lived at Hall Place from 1917 until her death in 1943. Lady Limerick made many modifications to the house and garden, including planting topiary.

The property was bought in 1926 by her son-in-law, the American financier James Cox Brady, who sold it to Bexley Council in 1935. The grounds are now a public open space and the mansion is used to house Bexley Museum and Bexley Local Studies Centre.

GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS

The oldest part of the garden lies to the north, enclosed within the remains of the C18 red-brick walls (listed grade II). The wall is breached by wrought-iron railings with centrally place C18 wrought-iron gates attributed to Thomas Robertson, a pupil of Jean Tijou, who designed the screen for the Great Parterre at Hampton Court (now located in the Privy Garden there).The drive associated with the gates, which are focused on the C16 Great Hall, probably went out of use when Robert Austen enlarged the house to the south. The garden is laid out mainly to grass with a central circular bed, quartered and planted, as are the long side beds, with annuals. These gardens are not open to the general public. On the east front, the current (1997) entrance drive leads into a grassed courtyard planted with mature trees, some of which are thought to have C19 origins. The tarmac path continues between the south front of the house and the south lawn, beyond which lie the tree-lined banks of the River Cray. From the south front of the house the path leads west to the C20 rose garden and, to the north of the rose garden, the C20 topiary. The clipped yew topiary figures are in two phases; the earlier phase to the north-west of the house, planted by the Countess of Limerick in 1932, appears to be of abstract figures. The later figures planted along the path to the north of the rose garden represent the Queen's beasts and were planted to commemorate the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953.

The topiary is planted around two sides of a lawn which is bordered on the north-north-west side by a raised grass terrace, with an herbaceous border against the brick boundary wall to the north.

West of the topiary lawn and the rose garden are further lawns with scattered trees, and to the north-west is a yew-hedged enclosure with areas of formal bedding between buttresses of yew. Further to the west is a herb garden enclosed within yew hedges, with central paved paths. The herb beds are edged with low box hedges. To the south of the herb garden, and c 100m to the south-west of the mansion, is a sunken formal garden extending north-east/south-west, enclosed by conifers and shrubs, with a central lawn and cut beds.

Lawns extend south and east of these features to the winding banks of the River Cray. Weeping willows grow along the southern bank and a footbridge leads over the river to water meadows which extend to the south and east. This area was modified in the late 1970s as some ground was lost when the A2 was widened. The rock garden made in 1953 from Kentish Ragstone was moved away from the south-west boundary and is now situated to the east of the water meadows; it has a water garden and shrub beds, and a conifer collection around the east side.

KITCHEN GARDEN The walled kitchen garden lies c 100m to the east of Hall Place. Recorded on the estate map of 1700, the kitchen garden had, until the late C20, a good range of glasshouses, some of which were heated. These have now (1997) been replaced by beds featuring different garden layouts, and a large heated Palm House which is open to visitors