Linley Sambourne House

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Linley Sambourne House is the former London home of the Victorian Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne. It is now open to the public as a museum.

From 1874, Sambourne and his family lived in a typical newly-built Kensington town house, at 18 Stafford Terrace in Holland Park. After his death in 1910 and that of his wife Marion in 1914 it was inherited by their son Roy who kept it largely unchanged (including furniture and decoration) until his own death in 1946. It then passed to his sister Maud (grandmother of the future Earl of Snowdon, who took Linley as his subsidiary title) and then to her daughter Anne, Countess of Rosse. Lady Rosse in 1957 proposed the foundation of the Victorian Society and continued the preservation of the house largely as it had been lived in by Linley Sambourne. In 1980, the house was opened to the public as a museum, including the furniture, art, and decorative schemes retained from its original inhabitants, Linley Sambourne and his household. It was owned initially by the Greater London Council and since the abolition of that body by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and is run by the Victorian Society.