Fire & Iron Gallery’s owner Lucy Quinnell has opened her home opposite the gallery annually since 1994 when the national Heritage Open Days festival first started.

In June 2024 her story ‘Acorns’ was chosen as one of ‘the first ten stories’ from around the country, to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Heritage Open Days. The full story can be read below. Lucy continues to open her house to the public every September - the details can be found on the main Heritage Open Days website each year. Heritage Open Days is now run by the National Trust.


ACORNS - The Fairy Tale

Three decades of Heritage Open Days.

 Three decades of eagerly submitting the entry for my challenging old house ‘Rowhurst’ in May, regretting doing so in July and August, and then loving every rewarding second of September. Three decades of coming to realise that this is a two-way process: something that gives out and absorbs, progresses culture rather than simply displaying it, and creates without fail a much more powerful whole than anyone could predict from its ingredients.

Can the magic be explained in words? I’m not sure that it can be adequately grasped or measured or described. It has to be lived. I can grasp, measure and describe it inadequately, however, and perhaps that is still worth doing? I was a young woman when it all began, and now I am well-established in wiser but wearier middle age. My Heritage Open Days journey is my diary of adulthood, I realise, full of stories and memories and research and revelations and lessons. Packed tight with astonishing people and incredible insights and – yes – that ethereal extra element that we might call, for now, ‘serendipity’.

I nearly stopped doing Heritage Open Days once paused by the pandemic. I think our local organisers may have prodded me (and more than once) to keep going. What then unfolded in 2022 and 2023 was nothing short of a real-life fairy tale. I know, I know – there’s no such thing. Hear me out – this is a story that still seems unbelievable to me, but I promise you it is all true, and again I am fumbling for just the right word to categorise what happened.

So there I was, exhausted and over-worked, striving like so many in 2022 to get well and to simultaneously drag my public-facing ironworking business over unprecedented obstacles. We’d been hit hard by bereavement, closures and serious family illness (again, like so many).

During lockdowns, I’d discussed with friends on Zoom how we might help to re-energise our depressed town, and we were determined to revive its cultural connections for the sake of boosting interest, well-being and pride. I chose for HOD 2022 to exhibit within my house an investigation of Jane Austen’s time in Leatherhead, as a deliberate revival of our extensive but forgotten local literary credentials. With a fellow artist, I planned to open up ‘Rowhurst’ as usual and add a gentle exploration of Austen’s ‘Astounding Invention’ (the official 2022 theme was ‘Astounding Inventions’): ‘Emma’, in which the setting of Highbury is undoubtedly modelled on Leatherhead. I decided it would be a nice touch to be able to pick out on our piano the song tune that the character Jane Fairfax plays in ‘Emma’: ‘Robin Adair’. That was the limit of my slightly jaded and trepidatious ambition for Heritage Open Days 2022. Work and home life were overwhelming, so I knew I must keep things simple.

I have always loved the themes set for Heritage Open Days, and I sometimes think that even the organisers don’t realise just how beneficial those themes can be. My house and site are old and enigmatic – when the HOD theme is set each year it forces me to push the history of my property forward, and to find something brand new for our regular visitors to enjoy. I could give many examples, but here’s just one to make my point: almost twenty years ago, a theme one year was ‘Sticks and Stones’; I thought long and hard about my building made from oak beams and flints, and realised that this was the perfect year to commit to a dendrochronology survey (‘sticks’). My Grade II* Listed Building has three phases – one earlier but undated, and the later two, according to the official entry, are “Mid to later C16, with large C17 addition”. Much to everyone’s surprise, “Mid to later C16” was transformed to 1346 (“C14”) by the dendrochronology results. “C17” was right but became a much more specific and useful 1632. Heritage Open Days did this, spurring me into action with a deadline and an interested audience. ‘1346’ changed everything. It shifted my research focus and my direction for the house. It made me look much further back in local records to find extraordinary hidden histories. It inspired me to pursue archaeological expertise and help, with Late Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, Roman, Late Saxon (and so on…) finds.

Shortly before HOD 2022, I was manning our forge and ironwork gallery opposite the house when a familiar face said “Hello.” I recognised Pip, a lovely customer I didn’t know terribly well but who had been on one of our blacksmithing courses. She had a young woman with her, Daria, who she introduced as a refugee of war who was staying with her in South West London. Pip asked me if I had any work available, as Daria and another refugee, Oleksii, were now legally permitted to work in the UK but were limited because they spoke minimal English. I had just that morning abandoned hope of tackling a major overgrown part of our garden for Heritage Open Days, having run out of time, and I suggested that I could employ them for a couple of weeks if they were happy to disentangle great thickets of brambles and briars. They turned up on push-bikes the next day, with Pip and her husband Ewan, and perhaps that was the moment the story really begins.

Oleksii walked past a large Twisted Hazel growing in front of my house as we all went to assess the choked Secret Garden flowerbeds, and he looked at it in dismay. The tree was one of a pair of corkscrew saplings I originally bought in little pots in Fulham in the early 1990s to welcome some of our earliest Heritage Open Days visitors. Like the year that we Hoovered the garden path, there was something about having matching architectural plants either side of the front door that made me feel like we must be on top of things (we never are…). I knew what he was thinking – I adored those trees (and still do) but I will never forget my very first HOD guest turning to her friend as they stepped inside, pointing at my beloved new plants: “Oh, that’s a shame. It’s got the worm.”

Using our phones to translate ‘bramble’ and ‘keep the small plants as well as the big ones’, Oleksii, Daria and I communicated about the gardening task and got to work. I mentioned to Pip and Ewan that I would be learning ‘Robin Adair’ on the piano, just enough to reach a ‘D’ ye tinkle plunk John plunk tinkle in his tinkle tinkle zing’ standard, to show visitors what the song melody mentioned in Austen’s novel sounded like. Plan B was (honestly) descant recorder. Pip said that Oleksii and Daria could sing, and with that they suddenly burst into song, right there, a capella, in the shadow of our giant chimney stack, surrounded by heaps of freshly cut thorny stems and against the roar of the adjacent M25.

It was as if the sky had split open and something glorious had shone through. Whenever I think back to that moment, the line from Gerald Manley Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’ springs to mind: “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” As these two striking souls duetted, looking like beautiful vintage Princess and Prince ornaments who had come to life and stepped down from a Christmas tree, the world’s modern troubles melted away and the motorway noise was drowned out. Daria is a soprano (who sounds like a contralto); Oleksii a bass baritone. Their voices are both huge. The moment was utterly surreal; incongruous. Sepia images of war refugees standing at exactly the same spot on this landscape flashed through my head (they’d been our theme in a previous HOD). Here we were again, in a situation I had once believed was confined to the monochrome past. Real, and yet surely not?

What do you do when something so sublime lands in your garden like this? I knew something must happen. I suggested that they might like to come into the house to sing to our HOD visitors. Lots of things were lost in translation, but these gorgeous, loving, courageous people just said “yes” - enthusiastically - to everything. Our HOD moved years ago from booked tours to general wandering at whatever time and pace people prefer (because of demand too great for small tour groups), so Oleksii and Daria couldn’t perform at a set time. When our 2022 event began, it was quite simply a case of spontaneous singing sessions whenever the opportunity arose, accompanied by my CBT-practitioner-and-pianist son George who was seeing NHS patients upstairs online and rushing down in his lunch break to play with our new singing friends.

Oleksii was gardening throughout, unexpectedly weaving me tiny traditional fence hurdles from the cut thorny stems. They were exquisite, and he set them in a circle in the orchard, presumably because I had tried to talk about ‘stage sets’ in terms of garden style. “Wonderful!” I said. “We can put the pigs in here.” Again, he looked dismayed, and gesticulated “Too low”, and that the pigs would escape. “It’s fine”, I said slowly. “They are metal pigs.”

Around my work, I taught Oleksii to say words like ‘lawnmower’, ‘Japanese Anemone’ and ‘archaeology’ (I was gutted when he later failed an English test – they evidently didn’t ask him about flower names, gardening equipment or King Alfred the Great, and I didn’t teach him about asking directions to London Waterloo or the date of St. David’s Day. Much like my O- and A-level French back in the day – I excelled at chatting away about poisonous mushrooms in the Pyrénées and Women at Work, but couldn’t manage a meaningful conversation at a family wedding in France).

Daria and Pip pulled foliage in from the garden to add to my sunflowers, and we filled the house as if there was a wedding. Apples were a part of our Jane Austen theme, so we placed apples and apple twigs along mantelpieces and windowsills.

This was the HOD that very nearly wasn’t. HM The Queen had died at the very start, and we awaited a decision about continuing at all. It was the right decision from the organisers, we were certain, and we were glad to present such a positive and warm community event in the midst of all the turbulent world news.

It was… extraordinary. Oleksii, Daria and George performed to enchanted HOD guests, and people cried and stayed and sang along. Here we all were, neighbours singing around a piano at an event which told the story of people visiting each other’s houses and singing around pianos more than two hundred years earlier. ‘Randalls’, the Westons’ house in ‘Emma’, was once the next house along from mine through the trees, and owned by Jane Austen’s cousin. A Mr. Weston bought items from a farm auction at my house in 1857, the same year that on a different continent my mixed-race ancestors treated cholera patients in Kanpur and somehow scraped through the Indian Mutiny. The clay woodland between Rowhurst and Randalls was the scene of a brutal murder of an unidentified woman in 1834, and I showed Daria the resultant well-known folk song written by brickyard worker James Fairs and collected by Lucy Broadwood: ‘The Poor Murdered Woman’. Daria chose to sing ‘Dido’s Lament: “When I am laid in earth”’ in response. A female newcomer to our Leatherhead landscape singing to a female stranger who walked this way nearly two centuries ago.

Not a dry eye in the house, for days on end. Friends and strangers hurled together by big life events, grieving for so many things. A spot of time.

I thought that these broad, rich voices might blast the old diamond panes of window glass from their lead and iron framework, so powerful were they. As the days went on, I was back in the “What do we do with these voices?” dilemma. Tucked in a corner, I filmed them on my phone, and sent a message to my opera singer friend Jeff Stewart. I’ve kept the message – it seems so long ago now. Jeff replied by asking what they were both doing in three weeks’ time. On 26 September 2022 they both performed with Jeff in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Soon after that, they sang solos at St. Vedast-alias-Foster. Daria was offered a place at the Royal College of Music, and Oleksii is now studying at the Guildhall School of Music. Last Christmas, they both sang solos with the ‘Songs for Ukraine Chorus’ at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. In January, I took my very ill husband on a rare, sobering and ironically restorative outing to step out of our world and into their mettled community and hear them singing in London’s Ukrainian Cathedral in Duke Street. Last week they sang exquisitely with their musical friends at St. Margaret’s Church in Putney, raising more money with exceptional music to add to funds which have to date sent over 50 equipped ambulances to the war zones. Next Monday, Oleksii is performing in ‘The Magic Flute’.

As Heritage Open Days 2022 drew to a close, I found Oleksii and Daria still in my living room as the light faded, sitting on dusty old sofas with just their hosts Pip and Ewan left, all four singing along with Oleksii playing an acoustic guitar. They seemed completely oblivious to the fact that everyone else had gone. Their voices had become much quieter, and they were a million miles away. Two couples brought together by and coming to terms with a tragic juncture in history, retreating momentarily into their own peaceful realm – just the four of them, alone. It was one of the most moving scenes I have ever encountered. I listened for a while, and then quietly retreated.

Despite their singing commitments blossoming so rapidly after that first September, I was delighted that Oleksii and Daria continued to help and sing here. They have changed our lives, and the lives of countless others, turning adversity into gold and becoming fiercely protective vessels for both their and our traditional culture and heritage. Warriors of light.

 As Oleksii’s English blossomed, we found ourselves standing by the Twisted Hazel again.

“Lucy, this tree – it is very sick.”

“Well, no, actually, believe it or not, it is perfectly healthy, and it was especially expensive precisely because it is in this condition. Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’. It’s twisted. Contorted. A corkscrew. Tortured. They are very popular in England.”

Our ‘architectural plants’ society suddenly seemed rather vain and impractical, as I recalled rather defensively a wonderful book about edible ornamental gardens. My gorgeous Twisted Hazels do at least produce nuts, but I understand Oleksii’s disdain, and – surrounded by old-fashioned Corylus avellana ‘Non Contorta’ (common hazels!) -  indeed I feel a bit foolish. I sense, I think, from what I see and what he has told me, a more pragmatic culture, and also one that has very natural inter-generational connections and seems to give greater opportunities and old-fashioned responsibilities to its young people. These two are so good at making people of all ages feel better. I had COVID-19 in October 2022 - mildly - and I messaged Oleksii to tell him to avoid visiting us. “Hang in there!” came the reply. “I feel that this is not COVID. Just a cold. More healthy teas. You can be warm by the fireplace, and tomorrow you will feel like a fresh cucumber.”

Enthralled and energised by HOD 2022, we dreamed of repeating the mood and camaraderie for HOD 2023. The new theme was ‘Creativity Unwrapped’ and we expanded 2022’s Regency theme and showed never-before-exhibited Anglo-Indian miniature paintings against a backdrop of the obscure story of the poor, the sick and the exploited of the East India Company. We explored the fascinating stories of the earliest Anglo-Indian people in Mole Valley, including more than one Rowhurst family. While we chatted to streams of visitors to the house and demonstrated the shaping of red-hot iron in the forge, Oleksii and Daria insisted that they wanted to celebrate the teatime close of our final day with an evening concert in our adjacent demonstration arena. They invited their friends and donations for a community Ancient Woodland and SNCI nature reserve that we saved and manage as a charity. The roof trusses, rusty old blacksmithing tools and tiered seating were dressed with sunflowers and ivy, and Pip provided cheese and wine for all. Oleksii and Daria had engaged George again, along with two musical Peters, and together they created a programme of diverse international music inspired by universal themes of home, entitled ‘Here, There and Everywhere’.

Songs of peace, love and hope became even more poignant when sung so powerfully by two young people stranded far away from their homes by war, supported by new friends trying to stand in their shoes and help them make sense of their current situation and harsh reality. It was, again, enchanting. A robin and a blackbird came in and sang with Daria in the dusk, and a great oak tree overhanging the arena dropped its autumn acorns loudly onto the metal roof to punctuate the music, like a magnificent and confident percussionist. This unexpected small company - five musicians, two birds and an oak tree - raised over £500 for the woodland charity, money which still goes directly to pay for the actual land (indeed, the very land where the oak tree is rooted and where the birds nest). No-one missed that the two singers needed help here in the U.K. from others, and yet here they were, using their exceptional skills and gift of friendship to help protect a chunk of the English landscape for its ecology and for the benefit of its immediate community – an area of socio-economic deprivation. I try to imagine how this will be perceived by those looking back on the story of the wood five hundred years from now. It has, as I said at the start, the air of a fairy tale.

We forged iron hearts and iron acorns to thank the musicians, and to thank Pip and Ewan for their spirited determination to bring everyone together for a greater good. This story is my opportunity to thank those who make Heritage Open Days happen. It is always, always a catalyst for remarkable chains of events, many of which you - those people I can’t name and haven’t met - never see. You plant acorns, full of promise. My story, I guess, describes what grew from just one of them.

We are participating again this year, and relishing the latest theme: ‘Routes - Networks - Connections’ – which flows on so smoothly from the previous events. Daria and Oleksii gave me an embroidered cloth at Christmas, and wrote an eloquent explanation of the symbolism of its woven threads and pathways through life. Daria wrote: “May the embroidered cloth on the path of life be your guardian. My mother always sang me songs about the vibrant colours of the cloth as a symbol of paths and trails that everyone must navigate in their lives.” We will feature threads and embroidery and the textiles of Rowhurst’s story, and I will use red thread to lead people through our ancient landscape criss-crossed with so many old tracks.

I was talking recently to a dazzling journalist about the entrance gates we produced for Shakespeare’s Globe in London. She and I talked about mediaeval rabbit warrens, ironwork, Ruskin and Tudor blackwork embroidery. When designing ironwork, I think of iron rods as threads – coiled, twisted, woven and plaited when bright orange and malleable. Tijou’s iron screens at Hampton Court Palace are stylistically so like earlier Elizabethan black and gold embroidery. There must be a connection. I told the journalist about iron giving red bricks their colour, and she replied: “Think of Spanish / North African iron-filings black dye for silk thread, which gave us blackwork embroidery – and took it away, since the thread rotted from the dye. Rusted.”

 This may be the year I restore the first of six chunky chairs I have grown to love, and tell their story to our HOD visitors. The twelve now-filthy needlepoint seats and backs were made solo by my grandmother, starting in World War II. Acres (I exaggerate, but there are several square metres) of sand-beige background, with plenty more beyond the immediate pattern to enable upholstery of the deep sides of the generous square design, have baffled me. Gran was an only child, a widow, a talented farmer of livestock, a spinner of Jacob wool, a potter, an ironworks manager, a mother of one, isolated in a remote house during and after the war. Where was the time? I had my suspicions about ‘why’, and I asked the journalist, as she had revealed her embroidery expertise. “Is your house dark?” she asked. “Yes, very.” “Needlepoint is perfect. Possible in poor light, and soporific, repetitive, self-soothing – like rocking.” I get it.

I will take the chairs to the needlework college at Hampton Court, six miles due north of us, for advice. (‘Rowhurst’ was once a hunting lodge, allegedly connected to Hampton Court Palace – although I have found no firm evidence of this link after 34 years of research. How did kings find their way back there, from any hunting lodge, through dense forest? Red thread?! I expect they had long-established locals to lead the way, familiar with every tree in any season – but I quite like imagining an ‘Ariadne method’ or a Hansel and Gretel trail of crumbs.)

Anne Boleyn was an accomplished blackwork embroiderer, I’m told. This suddenly has new meaning. I crave the chance to quietly sit and sew in my too-busy life, but perhaps many people sat and sewed because they craved a different life altogether. Bringing life, beauty and order to textile strands to cope with and relieve the tougher aspects of human existence makes huge sense. Attaching philosophical meaning while practising such creative and labour-intensive activity is surely inevitable. My other grandmother, also widowed young, and from a dirt poor, loo-less household of 8 children, brilliantly knitted Fair Isle jumpers at an almost frantic pace, with hands still scarred by the wire handles of weighty churns from her childhood milk round. Using time or making time to weave, knit and stitch of one’s own free will is clearly therapeutic – something that can be controlled, perhaps, when at the mercy of unpredictable regimes and natural challenges.

When I first moved to Rowhurst in 1990, I was a very young unmarried mother with Rheumatoid Arthritis, and I had just lost my own young mother and my grandmother. The isolation of this crumbling, tower-like building high on a ridge at the edge of town, in the strange No Man’s Land margin between London and Surrey, was almost physically painful – the ‘aching loneliness’ that most of us know at least at some points in our lives. Sundays were long, and for a while I made curtains, for others and (in the absence of being able to afford to fix the building itself) for Rowhurst. I love the ‘faded grandeur’ threadbare textiles of old homes, but wasn’t prepared for realising that Rowhurst’s 2024 resident threadbare textiles – with their faded colours and worn-through parts where individual fine threads are exposed – are those I made myself. It was me who had trawled remnant bins for cheap lengths of sumptuous fabrics in refulgent golds, greens and reds, and bought jewel-like new sewing thread to suit in citrine, emerald and garnet. I even made the iron curtain poles, brackets and rings in our forge, helped by my colleague, the late Alan Puddick, who made the astonishing ironwork for the restoration of the Tudor kitchens at Hampton Court Palace (a masterpiece of forge-welding). The iron hasn’t changed at all, but the fabric and thread have now become a uniform shade of hay.

I do remember the local organiser - the planter of acorns - who encouraged me to first take part in Heritage Open Days. I knew little. I was painfully shy. I was winging it, reassured only by my perception of my Twisted Hazels adding sophistication at the doorway. I grew from there; the history has grown from there; the audience has grown from there. HOD gave me a way forward – a clear route to pursue. It provided me with a network of remarkable friends, experts and enthusiasts, and enabled me to make connections – and ‘linking things together’ remains my favourite overarching theme to this day. I often say that Rowhurst was a very significant port in a turbulent storm for me, and others have said the same from their own perspective. Perhaps it’s true that Heritage Open Days was in many ways my haven, too – something that ultimately brought order to my tangled site, shape to my thoughts and structure to my life.

I’m glad a single acorn once took hold, to become the majestic tree that showered us with fresh acorns on that other-worldly final night of Heritage Open Days last year. An oak tree grows so very slowly from its acorn, and we are impatient, but we blink and thirty substantial years have gone by, and we’re glad – so glad – to encounter something deep-rooted.

 Worth planting.


Photo credit: The photos of Daria and Oleksii singing with the Songs for Ukraine Chorus are courtesy of Veronika Ward Photography