Syon House

Where it sits. Syon House stands in two hundred acres of park on the Middlesex bank of the Thames at Brentford, directly opposite Kew Gardens. The park still runs down to a tidal water meadow, one of the last on the London river, which floods at spring tides and keeps the setting improbably rural for a house eight miles from Charing Cross. The building itself is a plain castellated stone block with a squared plan and a flat roofline, austere to the point of being forbidding, and it gives no hint whatever of what is inside.

The story behind it. The name comes from Syon Abbey, a Bridgettine monastery founded by Henry V in 1415 and moved to this site in 1431 — the only English religious community to survive dissolution by going into exile and eventually returning. The abbey was suppressed in 1539, and Henry VIII's coffin rested here overnight in 1547 on its way to Windsor, an event attached ever since to a grim story about the lead casing splitting. Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector, built the quadrangular house around 1547; Lady Jane Grey was offered the crown here in July 1553. From 1594 it belonged to the Percy family, Earls and later Dukes of Northumberland, who hold it still.

Robert Adam's interiors. Between 1762 and 1769 the 1st Duke commissioned Robert Adam to remodel the inside, and the sequence he produced is generally reckoned among the finest neoclassical interiors in Europe. The Great Hall is a cool double cube in stone, screened with Doric columns, holding plaster casts of the Apollo Belvedere and the Dying Gaul. The Ante Room next door is the shock: twelve columns of verd antique marble, dredged from the bed of the Tiber and shipped to London, set against gilded trophies and a scagliola floor of extraordinary intensity. Then the State Dining Room, the Red Drawing Room hung with Spitalfields silk beneath a ceiling of painted roundels, and the Long Gallery — 136 feet long and only 14 wide, a Jacobean proportion Adam inherited and turned into a virtuoso exercise in pilasters and bookcases. Capability Brown landscaped the park in the same decade, creating the two lakes. The Great Conservatory of 1826 by Charles Fowler, in gunmetal and Bath stone with a central glass dome, predates Paxton and shows where the Crystal Palace came from.

On screen. Bridgerton uses Adam's Great Hall as the entrance hall of the Duke of Hastings' London mansion, and draws several of the neoclassical rooms of St James's Palace from the house, including the Long Gallery and the dining room where Queen Charlotte and King George III have their argument. The glittering first ball of series two was staged here. Interiors credited to Hastings House are split between Syon and Badminton House in Gloucestershire, with Wilton House supplying the exterior — a three-building composite that the edit presents as a single address. Syon's earlier screen record is just as strong: The Madness of King George (1994) used the Long Gallery for the scene in which the king receives Pitt, and the house for the Prince of Wales's rooms; Gosford Park (2001) filmed the upstairs bedrooms here; and the list runs on through Belle, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, King Ralph, Poirot, Daniel Deronda and Wives and Daughters.

What you actually see today. The exterior's severity is worth pausing over — it is a deliberate late-Tudor shell that later owners chose not to modernise, and the contrast with the Adam rooms behind it is the point. On the east front sits the Northumberland lion, moved here in 1874 from Northumberland House at Charing Cross when that building was demolished for road widening; it stands with its tail rigidly horizontal, a family badge. The gardens include the Great Conservatory, an arboretum with mature cedars and swamp cypress, and paths along the tidal meadow with Kew's pagoda visible across the water. The two Brown lakes hold heron and cormorant, and the water meadow is grazed rather than mown, so in high summer it looks much as the Thames bank did before the river was embanked downstream.

Getting there and timing. The house opens on limited days, usually Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday from mid-March to the end of October; the gardens open more widely, and both close in winter, so check before travelling. Syon Lane or Brentford stations, or Gunnersbury on the Underground with a bus, are the practical approaches. There is no longer a ferry across to Kew, so combining the two means a bus or a walk over Kew Bridge. The ground-floor state rooms are largely level; gravel paths and thresholds make parts of the garden harder going.