The living laboratory where Charles Darwin developed much of his evolutionary thinking, described by scientists as “Britain’s Galápagos”, is to reopen to the public next month to mark the bicentenary of the great biologist’s birth.

A £900,000 revamp of Down House, the Darwin family home near Orpington, Kent, will give visitors fresh insights into the story of evolution, with a new exhibition and the opportunity to be guided around its grounds by leading intellectuals.

Sir David Attenborough, Lord Bragg and the evolutionary biologist Steve Jones, are among the narrators of a multimedia tour of the gardens and fields around Down House, which will set out on handheld monitors their role as a natural laboratory for Darwin’s science. Professor Jones, of University College London, described the site as “Britain’s Galápagos”, because the observations that Darwin made there were as important to his intellectual development as those that he made during the voyage of HMS Beagle to South America.

Down House and its surrounding countryside have also been nominated by the Government as a World Heritage Site, to mark the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, which both fall this year.

The theory of evolution by natural selection, which Darwin set out in On the Origin of Species, is the foundation of all modern biology. It holds that organisms evolve by means of random mutations, which are then preserved if they are beneficial and help survival and breeding. When the house and its grounds reopen on February 13, the day after the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, parts of the original manuscript will be displayed for the first time, with pages from his Beagle notebooks. A mock-up of the cabin that he occupied on board the ship is also being installed.

The multimedia garden tour aims to highlight the countryside setting’s critical role in Darwin’s thinking. “Several years of work have gone into recreating the garden as it was in Darwin’s time, and now we can show it off with handheld video guides,” said Jenny Cousins, of English Heritage, which owns Down House. “It’s important because he really did use it as a living laboratory. We can show off the seasonality of the gardens – a particular plant might not be flowering when you visit as it’s out of season, and we can offer a guided tour with experts such as David Attenborough, Melvyn Bragg and Steve Jones.”

Darwin moved with his family to Down House in 1842, partly to escape Central London, but also because its surroundings offered great opportunities for him to study the natural world and refine his theories about its development. His experiments in the surrounding countryside included one of the first detailed ecological surveys, in which he catalogued all 142 species he found in the nearby Great Puckland meadow. He used the gardens to investigate plant breeding, and he did much of his thinking while strolling around a path called the Sandwalk.

Bob Bloomfield, of the Natural History Museum, who is coordinating a programme of bicentennial celebrations called Darwin 200, said: “Darwin’s ideas were certainly among the greatest ideas of the 19th century, and some people would argue even greater than that. Down House is the environment where they were developed and reinforced: it wasn’t just a home, it was a laboratory and workplace.”

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