Welcome to the Garden Room

Model of the Garden Room that was located in a sharp curve at the top of West Street at a right angle to the entry of  Lamb House, Rye, East Sussex.  It was destroyed by a bomb in 1940.

"The Garden Room, originally known as the Banqueting Room and used for formal entertaining, was built by James Lamb, probably in 1743, the same year as the Town Hall was rebuilt, and under the supervision of the same architect...  The entrance was from the garden by a flight of seven steps flanked by iron railings at right angles to the French Window which opens on to the garden from the Morning Room of the main house.  The small door underneath the bow-window led to a cellar which in Henry James's time was used for keeping the hand-cart with which Burgess Noakes would convey guests' luggage between the house and the railway station.  It was in this cellar that the German bomb exploded in 1940."            "Following the complete destruction of the Garden Room...and the subsequent gift of the property to the National Trust, it was considered whether the Garden Room should be rebuilt in its original form.  Eventually the Trust decided not to rebuild, but to erect instead on the same site an ornamental wall with plaque commemorating the use to which the room had been put by Henry James.  This work was completed in 1965..."  (The Story of Lamb House, Rye: The Home of Henry James by H. Montgomery Hyde, 1966, p.78)

"E.F. Benson first visited Henry James at Lamb House in Rye in the summer of 1900, and his Final Edition opens with a detailed description of this visit. . . .  Henry James died in 1916..."  Benson's lease began in October 1919.  "He began to feel very much at home there, and found he could be perfectly content living there alone with his small household, and his writing, chess, neighbourly card games, playing the piano, birdwatching...and playing golf.  Arthur, his brother...shared the tenancy from Christmas 1922" until his death in 1925 and  "Fred took over the entire lease...[until] his own death in 1940."  (from E.F. Benson Remembered and the World of Tilling, by Cynthia and Tony Reavell, 1986)

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