Lamb House
A Georgian townhouse in Rye that gave two novelists somewhere quiet to write
Open to visitorsa National Trust place — check opening times and admission before you go
Henry James took the lease on Lamb House in 1897 and moved in the following year, making it home for the next two decades and writing The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl in the garden room he took over as his study. He liked Rye’s quiet enough to make the move from London permanent, and dictated his later novels to a secretary rather than writing them out by hand.
The next novelist to move in, E. F. Benson, borrowed rather more than the address: Rye became the thinly disguised setting for his Mapp and Lucia novels, and Lamb House itself turns up in them as Mallards, the house that Miss Mapp and Lucia spend several books scheming to control. Benson lived here until his death in 1940 and served as the town’s mayor along the way, a detail that could have been lifted straight from one of his own Lucia plots.
James’s garden room, the one he actually wrote in, didn’t survive the Second World War and was never rebuilt, so today’s visitors see the house around it rather than the room itself. The National Trust maintains Lamb House now, in the middle of Rye’s old town and close enough to Camber Castle and Rye Harbour to visit on the same walk around the estuary.
