Montagu House, Bloomsbury

The rebuilt house was sold to the British Museum in 1759, and demolished in the 1840s to make way for the present larger building.

This Montagu House was by some margin the grandest private residence constructed in London in the last two decades of the 17th century.

The interiors, decorated by French artists, were admired by Horace Walpole and were probably comparable to the surviving state apartments at Boughton House in Northamptonshire, which were built for the same patron at the same time.

In the early 18th century, Bloomsbury began to decline gently from a fashionable aristocratic district to a more middle-class enclave, and the 2nd Duke of Montagu abandoned his father's house to move to Whitehall.

Montagu House in Bloomsbury was sold to the Trustees of the British Museum in 1759 and was the home of that institution until it was demolished in the 1840s to make way for larger premises.