There are, in the leafy county of Kent in south-east England, two large fairly isolated houses set a few kilometres apart. Neither has any architectural merit yet both are lovingly preserved by the British people.
One of the houses is Down House near the tiny village of Downe, south-east of London. The second is 10km south of Downe on the other side of the M25 motorway, snug in the Kentish Weald.
The three storeys of blandness that are Down House hold a central place in the history of science.
This is where, from 1842, the English naturalist Charles Darwin lived until his death at 73. Darwin lived in Down House for 40 years and it was from here that he demonstrated evolution and its operating principle and so revolutionised our perception of humanity's origins and the entire living world.
And it was from this house that Darwin, without malice aforethought, finally broke the church's stranglehold on science. Science was now free to seek the truth.
The house to the south is Chartwell. It is bigger than Darwin's house and not so bland. It is where Sir Winston Churchill lived for more than 40 years - from 1922 until his death in the house in 1965. Churchill was yet another commoner given a "royal" funeral by a grateful nation.
I visited Down House last year - the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth in the English Midlands and the 150th anniversary of his bombshell book on the origin of species.
And I had visited Chartwell a couple of years before.
One can learn a lot about a man from his house.
Darwin was the nicer person of these two great men, both of whom came to South Africa.
Darwin had enormous respect and affection for his wife, Emma who was of the famous Wedgwood family and who bore him 10 children.
His relationship with his children was equally as affectionate and the house was lively and noisy at times. The children would accompany Darwin on his routine twice-daily walks down a sandy track which had a circular path at the end. One can still walk that trail and see the tortoiseshell butterflies and the bluebells and the chaffinches that Darwin knew so well.
A £1-million (about R12-million) museum opened this year on the floor where the bedrooms were. Here one can view Darwin's original letters and notes as well as see his notebooks and tools. There's Emma's wedding ring and the children's stuff and Darwin's hat. In a life-size tableaux one gets a glimpse of what life was like during his five years travelling the world on HMS Beagle.
In his large, dark-panelled study, which is much as he left it, is the chair from which he wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and many other works that galvanised 19th century natural science. As Darwin was very tall, the chair was custom made and set on wheels. His children took great delight in scooting around the room in it.
The study table is still cluttered with various objects which were part of his ceaseless and incredibly varied experiments involving anything from worms to pigeons, insects to plants, dogs to barnacles. His garden is the epitome of a country garden and featured a great deal in his research. It is where he dusted bees with flour so his children could follow where they went and report back.
Professor Mike Bruton, the South African ichthyologist who is now a dedicated promoter of general science in Cape Town, when doing his post-doctoral at the British Museum (Natural History), used to play cricket next to Downe village, and have tea and scones at Down House itself.
He told me that because Darwin was not funded by commercial, industrial or specialist societies he was free to publish his findings without the spin that nowadays sometimes contaminates science.
"And," says Bruton, "he wasn't burdened with all the bureaucracy that goes with working in a university, museum or government research lab."
Yet, as a freelance scientist, Darwin was inhibited - by the church. He was to have been ordained into the Church of England but was drawn into natural science.
Established religion at the time insisted that every species of living thing was separately created by God. It saw the theory of evolution as a contradiction of the Book of Genesis). But Darwin showed there was no room for divine guidance in the perpetual changing designs of plants and animals. Genesis may be a neat metaphor, but that is all.
He showed that creatures that were able to adapt to changes in their environments survived. The others became extinct. Darwin visited South Africa aboard HMS Beagle in 1836 and years later predicted that Africa was likely to prove to be the cradle of man. Ninety years later his theory was vindicated by Raymond Dart's discovery of the Taung skull in the Northern Cape - the "Missing Link".
But Darwin never had the courage to state that man evolved from apes, though the inference in Origins was clear enough and drove clergymen wild.
I walked down to the village (Down House was spelt differently) and in the churchyard found the mossy grave of Darwin's faithful butler and confidant, Joseph Parslow. I had a fish and chips lunch at the cosy pub in which he and Emma stayed while Down House was being renovated.
Despite the ecclesiastical storm that Darwin unleashed, he had many close friends within the church but was well aware of the church's fear of the truth.
It had not changed from the 17th century when Galileo declared the Earth was not the centre of the universe. When they came to arrest him his persecutors refused his invitation to look through his telescope.
Only in 2007 did the Pope concede that species have indeed evolved from less adaptive forms.
Darwin's faith in God was terminally damaged as he watched the slow death of his favourite daughter, the affectionate, effervescent, 10-year-old Annie. It was an event that he wept over for the rest of his life.
Few of his children enjoyed robust health (one died at birth) and Darwin, having married his fist cousin, Emma (they were both grandchildren of Josiah Wedgwood the famous potter) wondered whether the Darwins, through inbreeding, were not doomed like a genetically impaired organism.
Darwin himself was a chronically sick man. Professor Phillip Tobias, with whom I spoke at the University of the Witwatersrand's Origins Centre (at Darwin's 200th "birthday party") has little doubt Darwin picked up Chaga's disease in the South American pampas.
Bruton says, "Darwin was a very unlikely scientist hero. He was shy, timid, retiring, comfortable and happy. He avoided confrontations and public speaking.
"He was self-effacing, modest, homely and a good family man...
"Thomas Huxley, the 'British Bulldog' who made it his life's work to defend Darwin's ideas, was more typical of an ambitious scientist. He was aggressive, belligerent and enjoyed confrontation and public speaking."
It was Huxley who, at a famous 1860 debate on evolution at Oxford, rebuffed a derogatory jest by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Huxley inferred he'd rather be descended from an ape than from a hypocritical bishop.
Darwin wrote many letters per day - "How he would have thrived with the Internet and e-mail!" says Bruton.
More than 27 000 of his letters survive at Down House and in other archives, some being on display at the house. Emma remained a devout Christian and was greatly distressed by her husband's work.
Darwin would have known Biggin Hill, just over the rise from the house. This is where, 100 years after Darwin moved into his house, a vital Battle of Britain RAF fighter base was constructed.
In 1942 the big house south of Downe was abandoned, the garden overgrown. Chartwell was considered too tempting a target for the Luftwaffe so the Churchills moved out. Churchill had lived there since he bought the place in 1922.
I was there in spring when the 40ha gardens were filled with birdsong and the giant trees in full fresh leaf. The house is larger than Down House and altogether more impressive. So are the grounds from a landscape point of view.
One enters the front door where some of the great figures of mid-20th century Britain entered.
As at Down House, one gets an intimate view of the man and his family life. In Churchill's large beamed study with its wooden floor and recessed bookshelves the desk is undisturbed - even down to the cigar cutter and little ornaments.
And here is one of the great ironies of the extraordinary life of Churchill: on his desk are framed photographs of his family but in front is a portrait of his one-time enemy, Jan Christiaan Smuts.
Smuts and Churchill were mortal enemies in the South Africa War yet, 40 years later, when World War II was going badly for Britain, Churchill decreed that should he, Churchill, be killed, Smuts should head Britain's War Cabinet.
At Chartwell one is granted quite vivid glimpses into the mind and soul of the man who pulled Britain through its most perilous years. Churchill's books are still in their proper places and one can spot his well-thumbed favourites. The one and only novel he wrote is there along with his other books.
The red-brown house is set upon terraces with interesting walled sections - walls built with great skill by Churchill himself. The water features were also engineered by Churchill and they draw their water from the nearby Chart well.
The house looks down into a small valley at the bottom of what Churchill called Swan Lake - a lake he had excavated and which he and a gardener landscaped. If the house isn't stately the garden certainly is.
Lady Churchill ("Clemmie") hated the house at first. The architect who was called in to make alterations shared her view. But it was transformed into something approaching beautiful and when Churchill was ousted from parliament in 1929 he spent the next 10 "Wilderness Years" working in the garden, painting and writing.
Churchill's untidy studio in the garden below the house is filled with his easels, brushes and many of his paintings.
The house itself has a great deal of artwork, including a Monet and some by Lavery and quite a few by himself and his daughter Sarah.
Oil painting was one of his hobbies but his income, for much of his career, came entirely from freelance journalism and books. One tends to forget how good he was as a writer. In 1953 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was never really wealthy. In the 1930s, realising his writing was not enough to maintain the house, he decided he had to sell. An unknown South African mining magnate stepped in and settled his debts, enabling him to stay on.
In 1945, by which time he had moved back to Chartwell, the Labour government swept into power and he again lost his seat in parliament - the "Wilderness Years" all over again. At 72 he announced he was again having to sell Chartwell. This time half-a-dozen friends bought it and donated it to the National Trust with the stipulation that the Churchills stay there as long as they lived.
Further information: One gets to Chartwell just as one gets to Downe - via Charing Cross station. But for Chartwell, instead of going to Orphington from where one takes a bus to Down House, one alights at Sevenoaks and catches a taxi.
