Visitors can experience Darwin's bedroom as it would have been in the 1850s, along with the dressing closet which is being reopened to allow children and adults to dress up as Charles and Emma.

With historically appropriate designs, artworks and key items of period furniture, our curators have tried to match the bedroom's original appearance as much as possible. Visitors can see a new, more personal, side to Darwin, from the fiction he enjoyed and his taste for Old Master prints to the impact of his ill health and the central role Emma played in supporting him. 

Look out onto Darwin's Garden Laboratory

The glimpse into Darwin's personal life upstairs is a contrast his study downstairs, where he wrote 'On the Origin of Species', and where his chair, dissecting stool, desk and his personal items remain on display.

The three south-facing windows in the bedroom gave Darwin excellent views over the garden where he undertook his ground-breaking experiments and observed the orchids, sundews, peas, hollyhocks and weeds which played a central role in his evolutionary studies.

English Heritage Curator, Sarah Moulden, said: "Darwin may have travelled the world but Down House is where he did his thinking and writing. On the Origin of Species would not have existed were it not for the rooms, the landscape and the gardens at Down.

"But Darwin's bedroom and its recreation reveal a more personal side to the great scientist. We want people to flick through the novels that Emma read aloud to Charles; we want them to try on bed clothes in the closet next door; and we want them to look out of the bay window onto the extensive garden 'laboratory', just as he once did."

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