Qualla: Somerset House

Somerset House: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit R Boed from Chicago, CC BY 2.0. If you were born in England or Wales between 1837 and 1970, the paperwork that recorded the fact lived for a long time in the North Wing of Somerset House. So did the marriage certificates and the death certificates: every formal entry in the public life of the country, gathered in one building beside the Thames. The architecture was Georgian and the bureaucracy was Victorian, and together they produced the strange paradox of a riverside palace whose business was registers, taxes, and stamps. Today the same quadrangle is a centre for art and culture, with fountains that play in summer and an ice rink that fills the courtyard each winter. Few addresses in London have changed function so completely while keeping the same stones.

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Image: R Boed from Chicago | CC BY 2.0

Somerset House: Old Somerset House

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emperorzurg123, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1539 the courtier Edward Seymour, soon to be Lord Protector for the boy king Edward VI, obtained a grant of land at "Chester Place, outside Temple Bar" from his brother-in-law Henry VIII. He built a great Tudor palace here, Somerset Place, that fronted directly onto the River ...

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Image: Emperorzurg123 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Somerset House: Chambers Rebuilds

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Pead, CC BY-SA 2.0 uk. By the 1770s the old palace was a sprawling jumble of wings from different periods, and the government had decided to demolish it and build a single grand public building to house the country's expanding bureaucracy. The architect Sir William Chambers, deeply influenced by the Pa...

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Image: Michael Pead | CC BY-SA 2.0 uk

Somerset House: The Royal Academy Years

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Rowlandson, CC0. From 1780 the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts was held in Somerset House. The painters carried their work up the great staircase to the top floor, where canvases were hung from floor to ceiling in the dense fashion of the age. The Royal Society, the Society of Anti...

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Image: Thomas Rowlandson | CC0

Somerset House: Births, Marriages, Deaths

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0. Civil registration began in England and Wales in 1837. The Registrar General set up his office in the North Wing of Somerset House and stayed for over 130 years. Every birth, every marriage, every death in the two countries generated a certificate that was held in this building u...

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Image: The wub | CC BY-SA 4.0

Somerset House: Bomb, Restoration, Skaters

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony O'Neil, CC BY-SA 2.0. Somerset House had a harder Second World War than its exterior suggests. In October 1940 a direct hit destroyed sixteen rooms in the South Wing, including the rotunda of the Nelson Stair, and damaged 27 more in the West Wing. The repairs, requiring stonemasons in short supply aft...

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Image: Anthony O'Neil | CC BY-SA 2.0