Museums worth the trip in Reading

The 12th-century royal abbey where Henry I is buried, reopened after a major conservation project in 2018.

The oldest and largest occupied castle in the world, the weekend home of the British monarch for 900 years.

The real Downton Abbey — a Charles Barry mansion in 1,000 acres of Capability Brown parkland.

A late-Elizabethan riverside manor still lived in by the Blount family, with England's last working watermill on the Thames.

A honey-stone Georgian Palladian mansion on the Thames — Netherfield in Pride & Prejudice (2005) and a Downton filming location.

The country home of the Dukes of Wellington, gifted by Parliament to the victor of Waterloo in 1817.

England's only non-royal, non-episcopal palace — Vanbrugh's baroque monster, birthplace of Winston Churchill, UNESCO listed.

A pink-brick Tudor manor lived in by the Palmer family since 1530, where the first pineapple in England was grown in 1661.

A Tudor house wrapped inside a medieval fortified manor, with walled gardens and the last surviving donkey wheel in England.