Harewood House - History

History

The house was built from 1759 to 1771 for Edwin Lascelles, whose family had bought the estate after making its fortune in the West Indies through Customs positions, slave trading and lending money to planters. The house was designed by the architects John Carr and Robert Adam.

Much of the furniture is by the eighteenth-century English furniture designer Thomas Chippendale, who came from nearby Otley.

Lancelot "Capability" Brown designed the grounds to which Sir Charles Barry added a grand terrace, in 1844.

Artist Thomas Girtin stayed at the house many times, painting the house itself and also the surrounding countryside and landmarks, such as the nearby Plumpton Rocks which at the time was owned by the Harewood Estate.

Harewood House has a long history of hosting visitors interested in its imposing architecture and collections of paintings. The first guidebook to the home was published early in the nineteenth century.

The house served as a convalescent hospital during both World War I and World War II.

The archives of the Lascelles family and the Harewood estate are held at West Yorkshire Archive Service. in Leeds.

Since 1996, part of the house's grounds have been used as the village in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale, which had been based in two different Yorkshire villages since its inception 24 years earlier.

Read more about this topic:  Harewood House

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    False history gets made all day, any day,
    the truth of the new is never on the news
    False history gets written every day
    ...
    the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
    sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
    asking the clay all questions but her own.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)