A detailed view of Darwin's worktable at Down House

This image shows Charles Darwin's worktable at Down House, with letters, manuscripts and notebooks on display. These items form part of the collection at Down House, built in the early 18th century, and home to the great scientist, Charles Darwin for 40 years until his death in 1882.

After moving to the house in 1842, Darwin and his wife, Emma, remodelled the building and its extensive gardens many times. The garden was integral to family life. It provided a place of play and relaxation, a kitchen garden to grow food, and perhaps most famously a place for Darwin to experiment and test his scientific theories. It was here that Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection and wrote his ground breaking work ‘On the Origin of Species’ (1859).