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.

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, built the house between 1759 and 1771 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,…

Artist J. M. W. Turner visited the house and painted the outdoor landscape in watercolour around 1797–98. The house was used as a filming location for the 1991 comedy film King Ralph. Since 1996, part of the estate has been developed as the village in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale, which had been based in two different Yorkshire villages since its inception 24 years earlier. Rock musician Elton John performed two concerts in the grounds in 1999. The popular ITV show Victoria starring Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes has filmed at Harewood House. On 1 July 2006, Irish vocal pop band Westlife held a concert for their Face to Face Tour supporting their album Face to Face. Harewood House was used as…