Wellington's grand London townhouse at Hyde Park Corner, still hung with the paintings and gifts he received after defeating Napoleon
Open to visitorsan English Heritage site — check opening times and admission before you go
A red-brick house at Hyde Park Corner was already forty years old when Wellington bought it in 1817. Robert Adam had built it in the 1770s for Lord Apsley, a Georgian Lord Chancellor — the first house travellers reached past the old Knightsbridge turnpike, hence its nickname, Number One, London.
Wellington bought the house from his own brother, who had taken it on in 1807, overspent on furnishing it, and by 1817 faced bankruptcy. Rather than spend the £700,000 Parliament had voted him for a new residence after Waterloo, he bid £40,000 for this one instead. Benjamin Dean Wyatt extended the house twice, adding a dining-room wing in 1819, then, once Wellington became prime minister, a grand staircase and the Waterloo Gallery along the west front, with the whole building reclad in pale Bath stone.
Wellington filled the Waterloo Gallery with his growing art collection, paintings by Velázquez, Rubens, Goya, Titian and Bruegel among them, many gifts from grateful European rulers after Napoleon’s defeat. He held an annual banquet there every 18 June to mark the battle, and on the main staircase stands a huge marble statue of a nude Napoleon as the Roman god Mars, carved by Antonio Canova and given to Wellington by the future King George IV. Iron shutters and railings, fitted after rioters smashed the windows around 1830, may be where Wellington picked up his nickname, the Iron Duke.
Wellington died in 1852, and his son opened part of the house as a museum the next year. The 7th Duke gave Apsley House and its collection to the nation in 1947, while keeping a family apartment inside, still used today. It became a public museum in 1952, run at first by the Victoria and Albert Museum, before English Heritage took over in 2004. A visit today means a paid, staffed tour through the state rooms, across the road from Wellington Arch and the edge of Hyde Park, with Green Park a short walk away.
