I’ve had the Handel Hendrix House on my “bucket list” for quite a while now and had never quite got round to going, so when my local U3A said that they were organising a trip there, it was a great opportunity to tick it off the list.
A Tale of Two Houses
The Handel Hendrix House is actually two adjacent houses on Brook Street, and obviously, it is a complete coincidence that two internationally recognised musicians lived there. It is also great for the alliteration that they both had surnames beginning with H!
You enter through what was Handel’s house and go up through his and down through the Hendrix property. The difference between the two houses is that Handel had the whole property whereas Hendrix only had a small flat upstairs. This left lots of rooms that were used for display panels telling stories rather than rooms set out as they would have been lived in.
On the first floor was a room where Handel played his music, entertained, and ate. In the next room was a presentation on his writing of the Messiah, apparently completed in only 24 days. The final room on this floor was turned over to an exhibition on Mozart’s reworking of the Messiah.
The top floor held Handel’s bedroom before you walked through to the next house and an exhibition on Hendrix’s time in the flat which was really only less than a year.
All is not what it seems
Next, you reach Hendrix’s bedroom, which is set out as it would have been when he was living there. It turned out that only the mirror above the bed was original, and everything else had been sourced from other places. This made me stop and question whether anything I had seen was original and whether it was all period pieces.
The final room on this floor was an exploration of Hendrix’s vinyl collection with an interactive display allowing you scroll through all the records and learn a little more about them. There were two copies of Handel’s Messiah so maybe he was feeling the vibes from next door?
The last room on the next floor down was a costume room where you could try on period pieces from both Handel and Hendrix but that was not for me.
Freedom
The whole visit took me just about an hour and I came away feeling pretty unsatisifed. Was anything I’d seen actually real? I found the place soulless, empty and a bit too clinical for my liking. The ticket price was “only” £15 but I wouldn’t go back again at any price.
