Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Thursday the 18th of May, which makes it a very special day for those of us who love music,

whether that's great classical music such as George Frederick Handel or perhaps the greatest rock guitarist who ever live, Jimmy Hendrix.

And unbelievably, they are both

celebrated in the Handel House Museum, 25 Brook Street in Mayfair in London, which reopens today

after an extraordinary bit of reinvention. And to find out more about that, I'm delighted to be

joined by Owen Falks, who is the assistant researcher here.

Owen, thank you for your time. Tell me about what has changed it, because the museum was actually

open before, but now you've done really quite a lot. Absolutely. Our project has involved

restoring the 18th century facade to the front of the house so that visitors can now enter through Handel's front door.

And we have completed a restoration of the entire 18th century house.

So we have a Georgian kitchen.

We have Handel's parlours on the ground floor.

And then we move upstairs to his dining room where he performed music and also

entertained guests and of course his composition room all the way up to his bedroom and his

dressing room at the top of the house. And it is a fascinating insight to this man who was of course

drawn to London, he also from continental Europe. And I've learnt things such as he wrote Messiah in 24

days in this very house, which seems unbelievable. But he was prolific. He was also long,

lived a long time. Absolutely. He moved to London in 1711 and he came at that point and was living in the houses of some of his patrons.

He moved into this house in Brook Street in August 1723 and lived the rest of his life there.

And indeed many of his most famous compositions, including the Messiah, as you say, but also operas such as

Giulio Chesirei, and things like the coronation anthems were composed here, and it feels like a

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