The Elizabethan period is immensely popular with tourists and nowhere more so than in Southampton, England at the Tudor House and Gardens located in Old Town where you can glimpse the medieval city walls and walk on bricks labeled with historical events from Southampton’s past. When you enter the house with the Elizabethan timbered effect, you head straight for the gardens in the back just outside the more modern cafe. The gardens look like a place that a noble might have lingered toying with a canon from the time of Henry VIII. Lots of spices and other common plants and flowers grow there with exhortations about how the Elizabethans thought about them. For sneezewort they say, “”double flowers were often called bachelor’s buttons”. For other uses of the garden they have pictorial placards with numbers. Gargoyles and other peculiar statues abound to give the place a period feel. Plentiful arbors and trellises create shade. Curiosities such as a Norman chimney make the escape from more urban Southampton unforgettable.
When you slip inside the house you are treated to a film narrated by a houseful of ghosts who tell you the history of Tudor House and Garden. At the end of the film shown to their “guests” they open the curtains to the room revealing a newly restored lattice window from the time period. Before you leave the house your attention is directed downstairs to the basement where you can tour a restored World War 2 bomb shelter.
