Qualla: Harewood House

Harewood House: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RichTea, CC BY-SA 2.0. Edwin Lascelles laid the foundations of Harewood House in 1759, and the money came from sugar. His father Henry had purchased plantations in the West Indies in the late seventeenth century, and the income from enslaved labour in Barbados built the country house that Edwin then commissioned from John Carr of York. Robert Adam designed the interiors. Capability Brown shaped the thousand-acre landscape. The Lascelles still live here. In 2007 the actor David Harewood, whose ancestors were among those the family enslaved, came to interview the present earl on camera. In 2023 a portrait of David Harewood was commissioned for the walls of the house. The story of Harewood is being told more honestly now than it has been in 250 years.

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Image: RichTea | CC BY-SA 2.0

Harewood House: Two Estates, One House

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Immanuel Giel, Public domain. What is now Harewood was assembled from two adjoining estates: Harewood Castle, the medieval seat of the Gascoignes and then the Ryther family, and Gawthorpe, the neighbouring manor whose hall sat in the valley below. The Wentworths of Gawthorpe bought out the Ryther interest, th...

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Image: Immanuel Giel | Public domain

Harewood House: What Sugar Built

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SMJ, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two hundred and fifty years on, Harewood is honest about the source of its wealth. The Lascelles family acknowledge in their own published statements that the estate was funded by plantations worked by enslaved African people in Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean. The house,...

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Image: SMJ | CC BY-SA 2.0

Harewood House: Carr, Adam, Brown

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, Public domain. The three names that shaped 18th-century English taste all worked here at the same time. John Carr designed the exterior and supervised the build. Robert Adam revised some of Carr's elevations and then took on the interiors, his designs approved in 1765: the Entrance Hall, the Ye...

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Image: Daderot | Public domain

Harewood House: The 20th and 21st Centuries

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, Public domain. Princess Mary, the Princess Royal and only daughter of George V, married into the family and moved permanently to Harewood by the late 1940s. The house was opened to the public, and the grounds hosted concerts connected with the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra and the Leeds Musical ...

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Image: Daderot | Public domain