The Commonwealth's London headquarters was built with Dutch bricks shipped home as ballast
Marlborough House on The Mall began as the Duchess of Marlborough's pet project in 1711. Her husband bought cheap bricks in Holland while on campaign and sent them back in empty troop ships. She fired Christopher Wren mid-build, and three centuries later the mansion houses the Commonwealth Secretariat.
In 1708 Queen Anne granted John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, a 50-year lease at low rent on land next to St James's Palace, part of it a former pheasantry. The duke left the whole scheme to his wife Sarah, the queen's confidante, who wanted a home that was plain, strong and practical. Christopher Wren and his son drew up a two-storey brick house with stone quoins, but Sarah quarrelled with them over contractors and eventually dismissed both. John Vanbrugh joked that she had made Wren her deputy.
Rivalry shaped the entrance. In 1727 Sir Robert Walpole, acting via his protégé Thomas Ripley, acquired the strip of land separating the house from Pall Mall, supposedly to block the duchess from a front door onto the street. Wren's gateway arch, built with that approach in mind, survives as a grotto, and in 1729 Sarah leased and demolished four houses to the west to squeeze in an awkward diagonal access. In the 1770s the 4th Duke had Sir William Chambers add a third storey.
After 1817 the Crown took the house for Princess Charlotte and Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She died before the purchase was complete, and Leopold was offered the Belgian throne there on 22 April 1831. Queen Adelaide lived in it until 1849, the collection that grew into the Victoria and Albert Museum was shown there in 1852, and the future Royal College of Art used it from 1853. Sir James Pennethorne enlarged it in the early 1860s for the Prince and Princess of Wales, whose fast-living circle became known as the Marlborough House Set, and George V was born there in 1865.
Queens Alexandra and Mary both came back as widows, and Queen Mary's pet cemetery and a rotating thatched summer house remain in the grounds. Elizabeth II leased the building to the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1965. Inside, the saloon keeps Louis Laguerre's wall paintings of Blenheim, and its ceiling cupola is ringed by works by Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi painted in 1636 for Greenwich.
Source: Marlborough House
