The Kilns was the house near Oxford where C.S. Lewis lived for much of his adult life.
The Kilns is a house in Headington Quarry, about four miles east of central Oxford. Lewis moved there in 1930 with his brother Warren Lewis and Mrs. Janie Moore, the mother of a wartime friend. The property became Lewis’s principal home and remained closely connected with his writing and private life.
The house takes its name from the old lime kilns that once operated nearby. Its wooded setting and pond helped shape the strong association between Lewis and the Oxford countryside. He wrote, entertained friends, and spent time with members of the Inklings in and around the property.
The Kilns is often confused with The Eagle and Child, the Oxford pub popularly known by the nickname “The Bird and Baby.” The Eagle and Child was a meeting place for Lewis, Tolkien, and other writers, but it was not Lewis’s home. The Kilns is also connected with Lewis’s final years: he died there on 22 November 1963, shortly before his sixty-fifth birthday.