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Lindsey House

The building that was Lindsey House in 1776 was divided into 7 houses over some time after that date. They form 95 to 100 Cheyne Walk. The main part of the old house, now 98 Cheyne Walk and the adjoining number 97, are National Trust properties. The owners in 1776 were a society of Moravian Brethren who arrived here in 1750, from Poland via Germany, under the leadership of a Ludwig Count Zinzendorff who died in 1760. Between 1750 and 1760 it was substantially restored from the dilapidations it suffered through the previous 17 years when it was empty. The last previous occupant had been the Dowager Duchess of Rutland who had rented it from the estate of the widow of Robert Bertie, third Earl of Lindsey, sometime Lord Chamberlain of England. With the house Zinzendorff bought land that was part of the estate that had once been Sir Thomas More's. The community that then lived here may have had a very similar concept of the true Christian life to More's but they were Protestant fundamentalists, heretical to More. The house that the Earl of Lindsey had acquired at the beginning of the 18th century had been built by a Swiss doctor, Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne. He, in 1639, had bought what was once the farm house on the More's estate in which that family had lived before moving to their Great House, later Beaufort House. Mayerne was a doctor to two English and two French kings and, presumably, several queens. It was probably such a list that presented him with the means to build this considerable residence. Number 97 is an oddity in that it is supposed to have been unoccupied for 108 years and thereby to have retained features from the time of the division of the old house including what is believed to be the original staircase of Mayerne's home.

O/S Co-ords:2688.7750
Source(s):

Chelsea

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