Brunswick House (London)
The Brunswick House , Wandsworth Road 30, London Borough of Lambeth is a baroque palace in London , a short time in the early 19th century, Friedrich Wilhelm von Braunschweig resided.
history
The house was built in 1758 and was initially called "Belmont House". The Belmont House stood outside London on Old Portsmouth Road on 2.2 hectares of land stretching to the Thames with a pier on the bank. On the site, the River Effra , at that time still above ground, flowed into the Thames. At the turn of the century, the house was divided into two maisonette apartments and rented out.
The property was named Brunswick House after 1809 by the tenant Friedrich Wilhelm von Braunschweig. He was heir to the throne of Duke Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand , but the Duchy of Braunschweig had risen in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars of Conquest in the Kingdom of Westphalia . After Friedrich Wilhelm had fought his way through with his black band from Oels via Zwickau to Northern Germany during the Fifth Coalition War against Napoleon in 1809 , he embarked himself and his troops on August 6th and 7th in Elsfleth and Brake and began his journey to England. Due to the descent of his mother Augusta von Hannover , a sister of the English king Georg III. , and the presence of his sister Caroline von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel , wife of Prince Regent George IV , England was his preferred target, from which he wanted to continue to act against Napoleon. In 1811 he rented half of the Belmont House. Friedrich Wilhelm von Braunschweig died in the battle of Quatre-Bras in 1815 .
After him, different tenants lived in the two halves of the house. In 1821 the future pastor and poet Henry Williams Baker was born in Belmont House.
By 1845 urban development and industrialization had taken hold of the area in the area and the house was no longer a suburban idyll. At the same time, the garden and the access to the pier were to be renewed. Around 1850 a fire destroyed the eastern half of the building, which then came into the possession of the London and South Western Railway (L & SWR) around 1860 , which had built the Nine Elms Locomotive Works on the neighboring property and initially a pier with cranes on the Thames property and built a train station. The renovated building was now used as an office building and housed a railway workers' club on its upper floor with a lounge, which offered various leisure activities such as table tennis, chess and billiards and organized a library, a concert hall and a restaurant. The Thames property was integrated into the premises of the locomotive factory. In the second half of the 20th century these industries fell into disrepair. When Nine Elms Motive Power ceased operations in 1967, the rails of the depot that reached to the house could be removed.
The plan of the Greater London Council (GLC) to integrate the property of the house into a motorway junction and, if necessary, to transplant the building itself was thwarted when the building was registered with "Grade II *" in the listed building . After the British Railways were privatized under Prime Minister John Major in 1993, the building went to the Railway Workers' Club, whose board of directors sold the building to a property developer in 2002. After two years of vacancy and squatting, the company "The London Architectural Salvage and Supply Co" (Lassco) took over the building in 2004. Lassco sells antiques in it. There is also a restaurant in the building called “Brunswick House”, which can offer the other rooms to companies.
Traffic flows around the house on a five-lane motorway, a railway bridge and through a bus station. Since the late 1990s, the complex of St George Wharf and St George Wharf Tower has slid between the house and the Thames .
literature
- Philip Stephens: How London's Brunswick House survived 250 years of change. In: Financial Times . February 11, 2016, p. 1; P. 21.
Web links
- Brunswick House , restaurant
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d e Stefan Lorett: Brunswick House, Vauxhall - a brief history.
- ↑ Augusta also called her retirement home in Blackheath "Brunswick House".
- ↑ Brunswick House , on the Historic Monument List, # 1357952.
Coordinates: 51 ° 29 ′ 5.3 " N , 0 ° 7 ′ 35.5" W.