page_title: Bowood House
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Bowood House / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Adam Room in the Lloyd's building
context_page_description: Bowood is a grade I listed Georgian country house with interiors by Robert Adam and a garden designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. It is adjacent to the village of Derry Hill, halfway between Calne and Chippenham in Wiltshire, England. The greater part of the house was demolished in 1956.
context_section_description: The first house at Bowood was built circa 1725 on the site of a hunting lodge, by the former tenant Sir Orlando Bridgeman, 2nd Baronet, who had purchased the property from the Crown. His grandfather Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, had been granted the lease by Charles II. Bridgeman got into financial strife, and in 1739 under a Chancery decree, the house and park were acquired by his principal creditor Richard Long (son of Henry Long of Bayford, Herefordshire. In 1754 Long sold it to the first Earl of Shelburne, who employed architect Henry Keene to extend the house. 
  The 2nd Earl, Prime Minister from 1782 to 1783, was created Marquess of Lansdowne for negotiating peace with America after the War of Independence. He furnished Bowood and his London home, Lansdowne House, with superb collections of paintings and classical sculpture, and commissioned Robert Adam to decorate the grander rooms in Bowood and to add a magnificent orangery, as well as a small menagerie for wild animals where a leopard and an orangutan were kept in the 18th century. Adam also built for the 1st Earl in the park a fine mausoleum, which is also Grade I listed.
  In the 1770s the two parts of the house at Bowood (the "Big House" and the "Little House") were joined together by the construction of an enormous drawing room. 
  In World War I, the 5th Marchioness set up an auxiliary Red Cross hospital in the Orangery.  During World War II, the Big House was first occupied by a school, then by the Royal Air Force. Afterwards it was left empty, and by 1955 it was so dilapidated that the 8th Marquess demolished it, employing architect F. Sortain Samuels to convert the Little House into a more comfortable home. Many country houses were knocked down at this period. But before it was demolished, the Adam dining room was auctioned and bought by the Lloyd's of London insurance market, which dismantled it and re-installed it as the Committee Room in its 1958 building. The room was subsequently moved in 1986 to the 11th floor of its current building, also on  Lime Street in the City of London. A portico from the house was re-erected at Roath Court, Cardiff.
caption: Lloyd's building Adam Room
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