In conversations with artists and labels of late, a theme that keeps coming up is storytelling: in a concert, on an album. Handel and Hendrix were superb storytellers both, the former of classical epics or biblical narratives, the latter of encounters, emotions, and experiences.

Handel’s house, home to the composer for 36 years, and its neighbouring flat, home to Jimi Hendrix, has now reopened after a £3m restoration, and its story now begins at the front door. Which may seem obvious, but until the museum closed in 2021 – 20 years after it had initially opened thanks to the vision of longtime Gramophone writer Stanley Sadie – the front parlour from which Handel sold subscriptions to new works and concert tickets was a shop selling luxury leather items, and so the entrance was via the mews where in Handel’s day stables stood. 

Handel returns home, 300 years after his arrival (photo: Christopher Ison)

But rapping the brass knocker against the vibrant red door of 25 Brook Street is an appropriately atmospheric way to today enter a house whose significance to London’s cultural and musical history can’t be overstated. When Handel first did likewise in August 1723, his first private home was a newbuild in a new area. He took it on leasehold: the man whose music was destined to define an era of Englishness wasn’t, being then a foreign national, allowed to own property.

The restoration’s attention to detail is astonishing. From curtain colours to ironmongery, sources have been scoured for evidence or enticing clues, and sometimes even actual items found – a mahogany bookcase, on loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum, may well have been original to the house. In the case of the kitchen, the pots, pans and pewter plates have been re-made using 18th century techniques, all based on the inventory made four months after Handel’s death. We usually talk of period practice in terms of performance, but here, the historically informed approach is no less rigorous. Records reveal the sort of paintings Handel’s collection comprised, and attempts have been made to find works by the same artists that best replicate it, in both subject matter and size. Two tea-cups sit on the parlour table, exactly as we know they once did.

Experience Jimi Hendrix's flat at 23 Brook Street, recreated from photographs (photo: Christopher Ison)

Handel was, most of all though, a man of music, and while art, architecture and artefacts tell historical stories, music only truly lives today through performance. An organ has been installed in the front parlour, one based on the chamber organs of Richard Bridge and Thomas Parker who had built an instrument for Messiah’s librettist Charles Jennens. Its sound will soon be heard in the house, along with that from an 18th-century spinet from the workshop of Joseph Mahoon in Golden Square, from whom Handel was thought to have bought an instrument. There’s also a beautiful 1754 harpsichord by Jacob Kirkman, similar to one Handel helped a near-neighbour to choose.

The spirit of Handel feels wonderfully alive throughout the restored house – Jimi Hendrix, however, once reported actually seeing a ghost, though it sadly wouldn't have been of the composer as Hendrix's flat was above 23 Brook Street, next door. But it’s another nice story, and the Handel connection clearly resonated with him – among Hendrix’s LPs were two recordings of Messiah, and both showed evidence of having been often-played. Hendrix’s flat – the only place he said he felt truly at home – has also been recreated, based on photographs from 1969, and the museum plans to find further ways to build bridges between the two musicians' times and work. Rather nicely, a rolled rug found in Hendrix’s room bears a remarkable similarity to the one that now protects the floorboards in Handel's parlour, itself based on historical sources. Theirs is an enjoyably curious connection, but the best stories rarely have neat narratives, and throughout this beautifully-presented museum, the rich tapestry of threads which bind each artist to their era, and even to each other, are wonderfully, and fascinatingly, told.

Handel Hendrix House, 25 Brook Street, re-opens today (May 18) – for details, visit: handelhendrix.org