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Rainham Hall – a beautiful 18th-century house improbably set in three acres of orchard among the industrial estates and scrapyards of east London’s outer fringes – opens to the public for the first time this week, almost 70 years after the National Trust inherited it. There was no money to open it to the public, so it was let for decades to a succession of tenants.
With no original contents, and a tangled ownership history, it could never have been pitched as a traditional cream tea summer outing spot. Instead, a more radical approach has been taken, restoring the building but keeping the interventions by generations of tenants – including a searingly blue rag-rolled bedroom from the 1980s, calamitously inspired by the Changing Rooms TV series. “It was such a striking interpretation of how the best bedroom of a Georgian mansion might look, we had to keep it,” property manager Ed Ikin explains.
The back parlour could make even the most hardy visitor feel queasy. The room is genuine Georgian, but its paint scheme was introduced by a fashion photographer tenant, Anthony Denney, 50 years ago. It is unfurnished but for a padded bench and a heaving seascape, gradually swelling into a violent storm, projected on all four panelled walls and...