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Using money raised by National Lottery players, The National Lottery Heritage Fund supports projects that connect people and communities with the UK’s heritage. Vanbrugh 300 is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, we have been able to develop a nationwide project that aims to broaden the awareness of Vanbrugh through special displays, free education programmes and lectures, throughout his tercentenary year in 2026.
In 1699 the courtier, statesman, and landowner Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle, decided to build a vast new house on his ancestral estate in North Yorkshire, choosing his fellow Kit-Cat Club member John Vanbrugh as his architect.
The house is hardly credible as a first architectural project. The whole conception is too original and developed to be the work of a beginner — but it is just that. We will never know how Vanbrugh was able to convince the Earl that he was the correct choice as architect, but clearly the fact he had never built a house before was of no importance: it was Vanbrugh’ imagination and understanding of what the house should be that mattered.
In the twentieth century, the house had a terrible fire during the second world war when it was rented to a girl’ school. Later, it was famous for being used as the setting for the television series Brideshead Revisited and more recently it featured in the first season of Bridgerton. In the last few years, the castle has gone through a massive restoration programme, which includes bringing the Tapestry Drawing Room back to life from the empty shell it had been since the wartime fire.
Vanbrugh had a lot of help with the practical design and construction from Nicholas Hawksmoor and employed a local builder, William Etty, who would have known the best local craftsmen to use. The Earl of Carlisle himself was also very involved in its development. Between 1699 and 1702 the design for the house evolved through a series of prototypes before the final form was reached. A model of it was made to show the King in 1700 and work started the following year. The building was sufficiently advanced for engravings of the house to appear in the 1715 edition of Vitruvius Brittamnicus, a book of important designs by British architects of the day.
The Earl’s home was topped with a dramatic masonry dome, the first of its kind on a private residence in England. This, together with the other lanterns, towers, urns, and finials, presented a vast and dramatic skyline.
Later, Vanbrugh designed the gardens, plantations, outworks, layouts and adornments as an integral part of the castle. As a result, the wider landscape contains an array of towers, follies, and monuments, including a pyramid entrance gate and totally unnecessary military fortifications. One of the most remarkable garden buildings is Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds which he designed just two years before his death in 1726.
Secrets of Vanbrugh
The letters sent by Vanbrugh to the third Earl of Carlisle provide an invaluable insight into the relationship between the architect and patron and the process of creating Castle Howard. They reveal that Vanbrugh always wanted the house to be completed with a symmetrical west wing, but his pleas were ignored and the Earl instead focused on the wider landscape.
Don't Miss
The iconic dome, which provides the house with its unique profile and crowns the great hall at the heart of the house. Outside, don’t miss Temple of the Four Winds, Vanbrugh’s last work which encapsulates his evolution as an architect over quarter of a century.
