Bridgewater House is at 14 Cleveland Row, Westminster, London, England. It is a Grade I listed building.[1]
The earliest known house on the site was Berkshire House built in about 1626-27 for Thomas Howard, second son of the Earl of Suffolk and Master of the Horse to Charles I of England when he was Prince of Wales.[2] Howard was later created Earl of Berkshire. After being occupied by Parliamentarian troops in the English Civil War, used for the Portuguese Embassy, and lived in by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, the house was lived in by Charles II's mistress Barbara Villiers, who was made Duchess of Cleveland in 1670, following which the house was known as Cleveland House. She refaced the old house and added new wings. After being owned for some years by a speculator the house was sold in 1700 to John Egerton, 3rd Earl of Bridgewater, after which it passed by inheritance until 1948.[3]
Cleveland House was re-designed in the Palazzo style by Sir Charles Barry in 1840 and the rebuilding was completed and renamed in 1854 for Lord Ellesmere, heir of the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. It is built in Bath stone with a slate roof in three storeys with a basement. It was famous, in both incarnations, as the site of the Stafford Galley (in Cleveland House) and Bridgewater Gallery (in Bridgewater House), where the collections of paintings of the Duke of Bridgewater and his nephew and heir George Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland (whose second son Ellesmere was) were on at least semi-public display. The collection included about 70 paintings from the famous Orleans Collection, some of which are now in the Sutherland Loan to the National Gallery of Scotland. The collection was opened in 1803, and could be visited on Wednesday afternoons over four, later three, months in the summer by "acquaintances" of a member of the family, or artists recommended by a member of the Royal Academy.[4]
The building was damaged in the Second World War and has since been adapted for office use.[1] The painting Charles I Insulted by Cromwell's Soldiers, thought lost in the raid, was rediscovered in 2009. In 1981 Bridgewater House was purchased and restored by Greek shipowner Yiannis Latsis,[5] and is still owned by his family.