Somerset House, Park Lane

The freehold of the house was always with the Grosvenor family, while the successive owners of the lease were the 2nd Viscount Bateman, followed by Warren Hastings, a former Governor-General of India, the third Earl of Rosebery, the Dukes of Somerset, after whom the house took its longest-surviving name, and finally the publisher George Murray Smith and his widow.

[1] The new house was built with one side facing Park Lane, the main entrance being from a courtyard which continued the line of Hereford Street.

Although all surviving pictures of the house show it cased in stucco, at the outset the façades may have been bare brick, with the windows dressed in Portland stone.

This was shortly after he had been impeached, and he used the house as his London home throughout several years of a long trial which led to his acquittal in 1795.

[1] In 1813 the Duke wrote to his brother, Lord Webb John Seymour (1777–1819), about his wife: "Charlotte is as busy as a bee upon a bank of thyme.

[6] In 1819 the Duke again thought of building on his garden, and after negotiations with Grenville and Grosvenor a short two-storey extension close to the windows of the library at Camelford House was built, and in 1821 or 1822 a single-storey entrance corridor was added on the north side.

The twelfth Duke made repairs, carried out by William Cubitt and Co., but after he died in 1885 the house was empty for some years.

[11] When Mrs Murray Smith left she claimed that the house possessed "vaults with chains in them", including a cell said to have been used for prisoners being taken to Tyburn, but when this was investigated by the Grosvenor estate surveyor, Edmund Wimperis, he found nothing of the kind.

[1][12] In 1901, a writer in The Architectural Review complained that Park Lane's former "casual elegance" was being replaced by a "frippery and extravagance" which looked like converting it into another Fifth Avenue.