A second reading room has a library of books on interiors and is available to all. The shop sells the usual books and trinkets, and a sit-down restaurant provides light refreshments, very tasty hot meals and English wine by the bottle or glass. The gardens are closed during the winter months. Closest Underground stations are Old Street on the Northern Line and Liverpool Street on the Central, Metropolitan and Circle lines. Sundays noon to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays, unless it's a bank holiday.
Admission is free.
Stafford Terrace in fashionable Kensington, the spirit of Victorian middle-class life lives on in all its richness. Edward Linley Sambourne, chief political cartoonist of Punch magazine, lived in this substantial rowhouse until his death in 1910, and it remained in his family, largely as he had lived in it, until 1980. Sambourne's artistic taste is everywhere in this very personal museum. It retains the atmosphere of a real home, from the vintage lavatory fittings to the family photos and the scores of drawings and paintings by Sambourne and his artist friends. That is known because the artist's wife was a first-rate manager who kept minute records of purchases and held on to even the remainders of wallpaper and upholstery fabric.