Down House

Down House belonged to the great scientist Charles Darwin, who lived there for 40 years until his death in 1882. After moving to the house in 1842, Darwin and his wife, Emma, remodelled the house and its extensive gardens, which Darwin used as an open-air laboratory. It was here that Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection and wrote his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Darwin’s greenhouses, built in the 1860s, provided an ideal environment for his many plant experiments.