Venues in Chiswick
Chiswick is Palladian London — a villa that invented the English landscape garden, a riverside of Georgian mall houses, and a high road that has always eaten well.
Chiswick House & Gardens
Chiswick — Event Space
Burlington and Kent's Palladian villa, its velvet rooms and domed tribune, in sixty-five acres where the English landscape garden began. Five hireable spaces, from a walled kitchen garden to a chandeliered pavilion.
La Trompette
Chiswick — Modern British Restaurant
A Michelin-starred Chiswick dining room from the Chez Bruce stable, with a private room for up to 16 at the front and the whole restaurant available for exclusive use.
/ About Chiswick▾
Chiswick is where English architecture changed its mind. Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, built Chiswick House between 1725 and about 1738 to his own design, after Palladio, as a place to show paintings and receive company rather than to live in. The gardens he laid out with William Kent are where the English landscape garden begins: winding paths, classical temples and contrived views in place of the formal parterre. Burlington was among the greatest art collectors of eighteenth-century Britain, and the villa was built around that collection.
The estate passed by marriage to the Dukes of Devonshire in 1753, and in 1788 the 5th Duke pulled down the Jacobean manor beside it and added wings to make a proper mansion of the villa. The Devonshires let the house from the 1860s and moved its contents to Chatsworth; what was left of the estate was sold to Middlesex County Council in 1929. A charitable trust runs the house and gardens today and hires both, from the villa’s own rooms to the Garden Pavilion and the walled kitchen garden. Its conservatory holds a camellia collection thought to have been planted in 1828, among the oldest under glass in the West.
The river supplies the rest of the district’s character. Chiswick Mall and Strand-on-the-Green keep long runs of Georgian houses directly on the water, flooding at spring tides and unbothered by it. Chiswick High Road has been a dining street for decades, and Devonshire Road behind it holds the smaller rooms.
Green space is the point of living here: Chiswick House Gardens, Dukes Meadows along the Thames, Turnham Green and Acton Green. The Hogarth Roundabout and the A4 put Heathrow within reach, which is part of why the district holds so many company headquarters. For access, the District line calls at Turnham Green and Chiswick Park, South Western Railway stops at Chiswick and Kew Bridge, and the ride into the West End takes around twenty-five minutes.