Then and Now: Penshurst, the Tiny Kent Village With Its Own Leicester Square

Penshurst doesn't look like the kind of place that gave its name to a world-famous London square. It's a tiny village in the Sevenoaks area, built around a huge old house, a church and a handful of cottages. But tucked just off its main street is a small courtyard called Leicester Square - and it was called that at least a hundred years before the famous one in London's West End.

Penshurst Place, the big house at the centre of the village, was built in 1341. Despite the battlements, it wasn't built as a castle - it was a large country house for Sir John de Pulteney, a London merchant who was Lord Mayor of London four times. Over the centuries it passed through different owners, including the Duke of Buckingham, who was executed in 1521. Henry VIII then took the house for the Crown and used it as a hunting lodge, before giving it to Sir William Sidney in 1552. It has belonged to the Sidney family ever since - the current owner is Philip Sidney, 2nd Viscount De L'Isle.

Between 1618 and 1743, the Sidney family held a title called Earl of Leicester. One of them, Robert Sidney, built a house in London called Leicester House in 1635. When that London house was pulled down in the late 1700s, the fashionable streets built where it had stood eventually became known as Leicester Square - the one most people have heard of. (That Sidney title died out in 1743. Today's Earl of Leicester is a completely different, later title belonging to an unrelated family, the Cokes of Norfolk.) Nobody knows exactly when Penshurst's own courtyard first started being called Leicester Square, but it's widely thought to be at least a century older than the famous one in London - which would make this quiet Kent courtyard the original.

Leicester Square, Penshurst, is easy to miss. It's a small courtyard reached by a few stone steps, tucked behind a gap in an old wall just off Rogues Hill. It's made up of around six cottages, no two quite the same age or style. The oldest part, called the Old Guildhouse, dates back to at least the 1500s. Most of the rest was altered in the 1850s by an architect named George Devey, who had a habit of mixing old and new materials together - which is why the buildings look a bit of a patchwork today. One cottage was the village Post Office, and still has a postbox from the time of King George set into its wall. At the far end, an archway built on very old timber posts leads through to the churchyard of St John the Baptist church.

Just south of the village, a single stone arch carries the road over the River Medway. It's a protected historic structure - what's known as a Grade II listed building - probably built in the 1700s, and it's still carrying traffic in and out of Penshurst today, roughly 250 years on.

Penshurst Place and its gardens - among the oldest privately-owned gardens in England, with records going back to 1346 - are open to the public every year from April to November. The house is also a regular film location: it's appeared in The Princess Bride, Wolf Hall and Merlin, and more recently in the new Sense and Sensibility film. Leicester Square itself has stayed quietly unglamorous by comparison: no shops, no cinema, just six cottages, an old postbox, and a view across the Kent countryside its famous namesake in London could never match.

Source: Wikipedia, Penshurst Place, Wikipedia, Earl of Leicester, Historic England, Bridge over River Medway, Penshurst, Historic England, Archway Connecting No 3 and the Old Guildhouse, Penshurst, and Londonist, The Original Leicester Square