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Apsley House

Number One London: the Duke of Wellington's house at Hyde Park Corner, still full of what Europe gave him, with Napoleon naked in the stairwell.

Photo by Anthony O'Neil, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Adam built the house in the 1770s for Lord Apsley, and Wellington bought it from his brother in 1817, two years after Waterloo, with the country's gratitude paying for the alterations. The address, the first house inside the tollgate on the road from the west, was Number One, London. In 1947 the seventh Duke gave it to the nation with everything in it and kept a flat, which the family still occupies, so the state rooms are as the great Duke left them. The Waterloo Gallery, built for the banquet he gave his officers every 18 June, hangs the pictures he captured from Joseph Bonaparte's baggage train after Vitoria in 1813 and which the King of Spain then told him to keep: Velázquez's Waterseller of Seville, Correggio, Murillo and Goya's portrait of Wellington himself. Canova's statue of Napoleon as a naked Roman god, eleven feet of him, stands at the foot of the stairs, bought by the government from the man it had defeated and given to the man who beat him; the Portuguese silver centrepiece and the Sèvres service Napoleon had made for Josephine are in the dining room. It opens Wednesday to Sunday.

Where
149 Piccadilly, W1J 7NT
Nearest station
Hyde Park Corner · 2 min walk

Hours

MondayClosed
TuesdayClosed
Wednesday11:00 – 17:00
Thursday11:00 – 17:00
Friday11:00 – 17:00
Saturday11:00 – 17:00
Sunday11:00 – 17:00

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