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
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)