Sudley House was built in 1821 by Liverpool corn merchant Nicholas Robinson as a two-storey ashlar house. He had bought the land it stands on, some 30 acres, for £4,500 in 1809 from the Tarleton family, as part of the sale of their Aigburth estate. Both owed at least part of their fortunes to links to the transatlantic slave trade and the architect of the house, although not known, was probably a local man, John Whiteside Casson. When Robinson died in 1854 the house passed to his two unmarried daughters, Cicely and Ellen. By 1880, both women had died and the house was inherited by their brother, Charles Backhouse Robinson. He did not stay long at Sudley putting the house and estate, comprising just under 30 acres, up for sale in 1880 and in May 1882 it was purchased by George Holt for £22,000. Liverpool merchant and ship owner George Holt and his family moved into Sudley House in 1884 and George invested his inherited wealth, and enormous profits generated by his trade in foodstuffs, in his passion for collecting art. His collection was derived mainly from purchases from dealers and at exhibitions, rather than from commissions. Among his most significant purchases, which remain in the house today, were J. M. W. Turner's 'Rosenau', depicting Prince Albert's home in Germany, and Gainborough's 'Viscountess Folkestone'. Also among the collection are paintings by Richard Parkes Bonington, Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and the Pre- Raphaelites. The paintings now form the only surviving, intact collection of artworks once owned by a merchant family. They were bequeathed to the city in 1944 by Emma Holt and now managed by National Museums Liverpool.
His fortune also enabled him to enhance Sudley House
and furnish it to his taste. Both before and after the family moved in,
George Holt carried out extensive changes to the property, both
structural and decorative. He
transferred the main entrance from the eastern to the northern front,
creating a garden veranda on the eastern side. He extended the western
end, which included building the tower where he could get a 360 degree view across Merseyside and, rumour has it, so he could watch his ships come in to port. Many
of the features added since the 1880s can still be seen as the
fireplaces, lincrusta wallpapers and oak panelling are still in place.
The carved marble fireplace in the dining room bears the Holt family
crest and may have been acquired on one of the family's trips to Italy. When George Holt died in 1896, his wife Elizabeth and daughter Emma continued to live
at Sudley. Elizabeth Holt died in 1920, but her daughter Emma lived on
in the house until the outbreak of war in 1939. George Melly, the jazz singer, critic and art historian was related to the Holt family, and has described aspects of life at
Sudley House during his various childhood visits in the 1930s, when it
was owned by Emma, George Holt's only child. Emma went to live in
her country home in Coniston, Cumbria at the start of the war and died in 1944, having never
returned to live at Sudley.
In her will, Emma Holt bequeathed Sudley House and its estate to the Liverpool Corporation with the grounds remaining public park land, together with her father's wonderful collection of paintings, as an art gallery for the people of Liverpool. In 1946, the Corporation sold off the rest of the contents of Sudley and turned part of the ground floor into a temporary public library and inserted doors between the Drawing Room, Dining Room and Morning Room. Upstairs, they took down many of the walls and made the spaces bigger to show the paintings. The gardens however, are more of a mystery. The walled garden was a cutting edge example of its type, with double skin heated walls, glasshouses and a pavilion at one end. It was probably laid out as pleasure gardens, combining the more attractive fruit and vegetables inter-planted with ornamental plants and flowers. The more mundane vegetable production probably took place in the kitchen gardens on the other side of the wall.
In 1986, Liverpool County Museums, including Sudley, became the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside, now known as National Museums Liverpool. Since the 1990s, they have been gradually returning the downstairs rooms to the style in which they were decorated and furnished when the Holts lived in the house. As all of Sudley's original furniture was sold in 1946, they have installed furniture similar to those pieces which were once in the house, choosing, whenever possible, items in the Aesthetic taste which George Holt obviously favoured. In each room, there are touch screens inviting visitors to meet different members of the family, played by actors, who act surprised to see you wandering round their house, but are happy to have you anyway.
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