Ranger's House and Queen Caroline's Bath

Why is it significant?

You have reached an elegant red-brick villa on the edge of the park, with long windows and a curving bay at its side.

Key Facts

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You have reached an elegant red-brick villa on the edge of the park, with long windows and a curving bay at its side. It was built in the early 1700s for a naval officer, Francis Hosier, and in the nineteenth century it became the official residence of the Ranger of Greenwich Park, which is how it got its name.

One of its owners was Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, statesman and wit, whose letters of advice to his son on manners and worldly success were published after his death and read for generations as a guide to polite behaviour. He added the bow-windowed gallery, and the lane outside still carries his name: Chesterfield Walk. A few doors away stands Macartney House, where the family of General Wolfe made their home.

Inside today is a treasure most Londoners have never heard of: the Wernher Collection. Sir Julius Wernher was a German-born financier who made a fortune from the diamond fields of South Africa in the late nineteenth century, and he spent it on beauty: Renaissance jewels, medieval ivories, enamels, bronzes, paintings and porcelain, around seven hundred works of art. Ornate, slightly strange and utterly dazzling, it is one of the great private collections of its age.

Now look along the old garden wall nearby for a small sunken rectangle in the ground: Queen Caroline's Bath. Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of the Prince Regent, the future George the Fourth, lived next door in Montague House in the early 1800s. Gossip about her lively parties grew so loud that in 1806 the government held a secret inquiry into her conduct, the so-called Delicate Investigation. Her husband had her house pulled down in 1815. Only the plunge bath survived.

And so the walk ends among the houses of people who lived on the edge of history: a sea captain, a master of manners, a general's family, a queen who was never crowned. You crossed under the Thames, followed Nelson's coffin and stood astride the line that divides the world in two. Blackheath opens behind you, and the park runs back down to the river. Whichever way you go, Greenwich will make sure you know exactly what time it is.