Harewood House

The Harewood estate was created in its present size by merging two adjacent estates, the Harewood Castle estate based on Harewood Castle and the Gawthorpe estate based on the Gawthorpe Hall manor house (not to be confused with the Gawthorpe Hall near Burnley in Lancashire). The properties were combined when the Wentworths of Gawthorpe, who inherited the estate from the Gascoignes, bought the neighbouring Harewood estate from the Ryther family. The combined estate was sold to the London merchant Sir John Cutler in 1696, after whose death it passed to the Boulter family. They in turn sold it to the Lascelles in 1721.[2]

In the late seventeenth century members of the Lascelles family purchased plantations in the West Indies, and the income generated allowed Henry Lascelles to purchase the estate in 1738; his son, Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood, a wealthy plantation and slave owner,[3] built the house between 1759 and 1771[4] to replace Gawthorpe Hall, the original manor house on the estate.

Edwin employed the services of John Carr, an architect practising in the north of England who had been employed by a number of prominent Yorkshire families, to design their new country houses. The foundations were laid in 1759 and the house was largely complete by 1765. Robert Adam submitted designs for the interiors, which were approved in 1765. Adam made a number of minor alterations to Carr's designs for the building's exterior including internal courtyards.[4] The house remained largely untouched until the 1840s when Sir Charles Barry was employed by Henry Lascelles, 3rd Earl of Harewood, the father of thirteen children, to increase the accommodation. Barry added second storeys to each of the flanking wings to provide extra bedrooms, removed the south portico and created formal parterres and terraces.[4]

In 1922, Henry Lascelles, Viscount Lascelles married Princess Mary, the only daughter of George V. Initially living in the nearby Goldsborough Hall, the couple moved permanently into Harewood House on the death of Henry's father in 1929.[4]

During the Second World War, the house acted as a resident convalescent hospital[5] but by the late 1940s, the Princess Royal and her family had moved permanently back to Harewood, where the house and gardens were regularly opened[6] to the public and regularly holding concerts connected with musical establishments including the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra and the Leeds Musical Festival, of which the Princess was patron. On 28 March 1965, she was walking the grounds of Harewood when she suffered a fatal heart attack.[7] Her elder son, Lord Harewood, the 7th earl, succeeded his father in 1947, and resided at Harewood. He was director of the Royal Opera House and later of the English National Opera; nearer to Harewood, he was a member of the Leeds Music Festival's executive committee and a patron of the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra's concerts.[8][9][10][11][12]

Since 1947 the estate's Dower House, which lies outside the estate boundaries, has been leased out for use as an independent school.[13]

The house is the family seat of the Lascelles family, and home of David Lascelles, the eighth Earl.[4] The house and grounds have been transferred into a trust ownership structure managed by Harewood House Trust and are open to the public for most of the year. Harewood won a Large Visitor Attraction of the Year award in the 2009 national Excellence in England awards.[14]

Harewood houses a collection of paintings by masters of the Italian Renaissance, family portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Hoppner and Sir Thomas Lawrence, and modern art collected by the 7th Earl and Countess. Changing temporary exhibitions are held each season in the Terrace Gallery. Catering facilities in the house include Michelin-starred fine dining.[15]

As well as tours of the house and grounds, Harewood has more than 100 acres (40 ha) of gardens, including a Himalayan garden and its stupa, an educational bird garden (closed February 2023),[16] an adventure playground and the historic All Saints' Church with its alabaster tombs. From May 2007 to October 2008 the grounds contained Yorkshire's first planetarium, the Yorkshire Planetarium.[17]

The Leeds Country Way passes through the Harewood Estate, to the south of the house and lake, as does the route of The White Rose Way.

In a 2005 documentary, David Lascelles spoke about his ancestors' links with the slave trade,[18] and in 2007, as part of the BBC Look North programme, actor David Harewood visited the house and interviewed Lascelles, as his ancestors in Barbados had been enslaved by the Earls of Harewood.[19] In March 2023, it was announced that a portrait of Harewood had been commissioned and would be hung in Harewood house.[20][21][22][23]