URPoint Details
Open to the public, the house now has a significant art collection, and one room has fine painted panels by Lady Diana Beauclerk.
Lydiard House was the home of the St John family for more than five hundred years. In 1943, the local authority, the Corporation of Swindon, bought the then dilapidated house and its overgrown park from the estate trustees, to whom the house had been left after the death of the dowager Viscountess Bolingbroke in 1940. Almost none of the original furnishings then remained. In the 1950s, the Corporation began to collect suitable contents for the house, aiming in particular to restore the 18th century State Rooms. These efforts were much helped in 1955 when some good furniture arrived on loan from the National Art Collections Fund, part of the E. E. Cook bequest. During the 1960s Lord Bolingbroke loaned several St John family portraits to the house and later sold them to the Corporation. When he died in 1975, he bequeathed to the trustees of the house everything he owned which had come from it.
Lydiard House now belongs to Swindon Borough Council, the successor of the former Corporation.
- Type:
- Landmark