Basing House Visitor Centre

Basing Grange, The Street
Old Basing, Basingstoke, Hampshire

Satnav use RG24 8AE

tel 0845 603 5635 call charges

• Contact us

Opening times

• Saturday to Thursday, 2 March 2013 – 31 Oct 2013.

• 11am–4pm

• Closed Fridays

Admission

• Adult £5.10

• Concession £4.60

• Child (aged 5–15 years) £4.10

• Family (2 adults + 2 children or 1 adult + up to 3 Children) £14.30

• Under 5s FREE

• Carer (with paying disabled visitor) FREE

• Special rate for pre-booked groups of 15+ persons

  • Group Adult/Concession £3.80

  • Group Child (aged 5–15 yrs) £2.25

Refreshments

Hot and cold drinks and biscuits can be purchased from the visitor centre during opening hours (11am–4pm).

Audio tours/Podcasts

Be guided on your visit around Basing House by a choice of two characters who lived there in the past. The tours are available in mp3 format and can be downloaded before your visit.

If you prefer to use a written guide then the same tours are available as trail leaflets.

Perfect Place for a Picnic

There are picnic benches available on site, but please remember to take your rubbish home with you.

Teas, coffees and cold drinks are on sale in our Visitor Centre.

Toilets and Baby Changing

There are toilets, accessible toilets and baby changing facilities at the Visitor Centre and the Garrison Gate entrance.

There is also an accessible toilet in the Museum. See the site plan for locations.

Dogs

Basing House is a dog-free site, but assistance dogs are welcome.

See the display which introduces Basing House and its long and fascinating history, browse the shelves in our Gift Shop, with our lovely range of Emma Bridgewater and Cath Kidston items, or enjoy a hot or cold drink (perhaps a stop on your walk of the Old Basing Heritage Trail).

Visits to the Visitor Centre are free of charge. Why not drop in even if not intending to visit the rest of the site that day?

A remarkable survivor. The Great Barn at Basing Grange was built in 1535, shortly before a visit by Henry VIII. It was mainly used for storing hundreds of sheaves of corn and barley harvested from the Paulet's vast estate.

It is one of the largest examples of its kind in England and is the only Tudor building at Basing House to have survived intact to the present day. This is all the more remarkable since it was the at the centre of a famous attack by the Parliamentary army in 1643, an event which gave the barn its local nickname of "The Bloody Barn".

You can now experience what it would have been like to have been trapped in the barn while it was under attack in a hair-raising sound & light show inside the barn.

Our new museum exhibition focuses on

• the archaeology of Basing House, where people have been digging for 360 years!
• life at Basing in its Tudor and Elizabethan heyday
• the Civil War and the downfall of Basing

No stately home would be without its formal garden, as a place for relaxation and entertainment but also a source of plants used in medicine.

The walled garden reflects the final phase of Basing as a great house in the Jacobean period, 1600-1625. Sadly no contemporary illustration or description survives so a distinguished panel of garden historians have designed this garden following the design principles of the day and based on the Paulet family's heraldic devices and their motto ‘Aymes Loyaulte’ (‘Love Loyalty.’)