Open to visitorsa National Trust place — check opening times and admission before you go
Uppark sits high on the Downs above Harting Downs, a 17th-century house with two unlikely claims to fame: a young Emma Hamilton, later Nelson’s mistress, was mistress of the house’s owner here in the 1780s, and H.G. Wells spent part of his boyhood at Uppark while his mother worked as housekeeper, reading his way through the library. A fire gutted the house in 1989, and the National Trust’s painstaking restoration is as much the story now as the collection inside. The garden is free to explore any day it’s open; the house needs a ticket, and a guided tour on some days. The South Downs Way passes about a kilometre off.
