Qualla: St John's House, Warwick

St John's House, Warwick: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roland Turner, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two workmen digging behind St John's Court flats in 1987 came up with skulls. They were not the first to discover bones in the soil east of Warwick town centre; in the 1830s, gardeners cultivating the kitchen patch behind St John's House had unearthed human remains. The explanation is one the house has carried for almost nine hundred years: the ground was once a hospital cemetery. In the twelfth century, where the Jacobean mansion now stands, William de Beaumont, Earl of Warwick, founded the Hospital of St John the Baptist - a charitable institution housing the sick poor and providing food and overnight shelter to pilgrims travelling through the town. The bones surface still.

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Image: Roland Turner | CC BY-SA 2.0

St John's House, Warwick: Pilgrims, Lepers, and Alms

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robin Stott, CC BY-SA 2.0. Medieval Warwick had two charitable hospitals at its eastern gate, both founded in the mid-twelfth century under the protection of the Beaumont earls. St John's served pilgrims and the local sick; St Michael's, slightly further out, was a leper hospital reserved for those sufferi...

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Image: Robin Stott | CC BY-SA 2.0

St John's House, Warwick: The Mansion Built on the Ruins

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Dissolution of the Monasteries swept the Hospital away in the 1540s, and Henry VIII granted the land to Anthony Stoughton in reward for unspecified services to the crown. The Stoughton family held the property for the next four centuries, though for the first generation or tw...

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Image: DeFacto | CC BY-SA 4.0

St John's House, Warwick: Young Gentlemen and Young Ladies

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Motacilla, CC BY-SA 4.0. From 1791 the Earl of Warwick rented the house out for the first time. William T Fowler converted it into St John's Academy, a school for young gentlemen advertised on hand-bills throughout the area. The school passed in 1845 to Fowler's son-in-law Benjamin Townsend; when Townsen...

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Image: Motacilla | CC BY-SA 4.0

St John's House, Warwick: The War Department, then Montgomery

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Trimming, CC BY-SA 2.0. After a brief spell of private tenancy, the War Department took over the house in the early twentieth century and used it as administrative headquarters for the Home Counties and East Anglian Brigades. The Warwick Castle Estates sold the building in 1959 along with much of the re...

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Image: Peter Trimming | CC BY-SA 2.0

St John's House, Warwick: From Museum to Wedding Venue

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0. The museum closed to the general public in 2016 - costs rising, visitor numbers falling, the Fusiliers' collection eventually relocated to Pageant House on Jury Street in central Warwick in 2023. The building did not close. It is now Warwickshire Heritage Learning, hosting school...

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Image: Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom | CC BY-SA 2.0