Finchcocks

The house was built in 1725 and named after the family who lived on the site in the 13th century. It is noted for its brickwork and has a dramatic front elevation attributed to Thomas Archer. It is located in 13 acres (5.3 ha) of grounds. There is parkland to the front and a garden to the rear with wide lawns, mature shrub borders, an orchard for wild flowers, and a walled garden. There are extensive views over the Kentish landscape of park, farmland, and hop-gardens.

The house, with impressive facades both back and front, is deceptive – the interior is a series of interconnecting rooms without corridors and only 13 metres deep.[3] Those rooms, with their high ceilings and oak panelling, provided an ideal setting for music performed on period instruments; the house and instruments were used regularly for recordings by leading exponents of early music such as Trevor Pinnock, Simon Preston and Nigel North. There is also a jazz club which was founded by Alastair Laurence of the Broadwood Piano company and was developed by Roan Kearsey-Lawson into a premier jazz venue where international artists have appeared including Frank Holder and Duncan Lamont. The club has also been featured on BBC One television.

Finchcocks was acquired by Richard Burnett, a fortepianist, in 1970. The Adlam Burnett workshop (founded by Derek Adlam and Richard Burnett) was set up at the house and enabled instrument makers to produce copies of historical keyboard instruments in an ideal environment, learning from the construction of many originals. The building housed the Katrina and Richard Burnett collection of over 100 historical keyboard instruments; about forty of which were fully restored to playing condition. These could be seen and heard whenever the house was open to the public; it was one of the few collections of historical instruments at which people were welcome to play them themselves. With the Burnetts' retirement in 2015, the museum closed and many of its instruments were auctioned off for charity.[4] The auction catalogue[5] documented the instruments meticulously and in the auction many fetched two or three times the estimated prices. A total of £835,462 was raised from the sale of the collection.[6]

Fourteen instruments from the collection were retained and form the Richard Burnett Heritage Collection, to be housed in 2018 at the Burnetts' home in Tunbridge Wells.[3][7]

There is also a collection of musical pictures, prints and an exhibition on the theme of London's 18th-century pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens.

• Burnett, R: English Pianos at Finchcocks, Early Music (1985)
• Burnett, K and R: Finchcocks Past & Present (2003)
• Dow, W: Finchcocks Collection, Catalogue: the Richard Burnett Collection of Historical Keyboard *Instruments (1989)

• List of music museums

• Finchcocks Charity and Richard Burnett Heritage Collection
• Finchcocks Residential Piano School