Summary

A Victorian Tudor Revival country house near Rothbury in Northumberland, the first house in the world lit by hydroelectric power, managed by the National Trust, used as a filming location for The Current War (2017) and chosen by Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) as the visual basis for Lockwood Manor.

About this location

Cragside stands on the edge of a moorland crag above the River Coquet near Rothbury in Northumberland. The house was built from 1862 for William Armstrong, the Newcastle armaments manufacturer and inventor who founded Armstrong Whitworth and developed the Armstrong gun and the hydraulic crane. Armstrong began with a modest shooting box on the crag, which he expanded over the following decades with architect Richard Norman Shaw into a large and complex Tudor Revival house. The final result — a rambling, asymmetric structure of gabled wings, bay windows, stone walls, and tall chimneys, set dramatically on its crag above a rocky gorge — is one of Shaw’s most significant achievements and a defining example of the Old English style.

Armstrong’s engineering ingenuity extended throughout the estate. In 1880 he installed hydroelectric lighting powered by a turbine in the making Cragside the first house in the world to use hydroelectric power for domestic lighting. The estate also contained a hydraulic lift, a hydraulic rotisserie, a water-powered laundry and sawmill, and a hydraulic ram to pump water to an upper reservoir. Armstrong built a series of dams in the to create lakes that powered these systems, and planted millions of trees across what had been open moorland to create one of the largest Victorian rock gardens in Europe.

Armstrong was the first scientist or engineer to be elevated to the peerage, becoming Baron Armstrong in 1887. After the last Armstrong died without heirs, Cragside passed to the National Trust in 1977. The estate covers approximately 1,000 acres.

The Current War (2017, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Thomas Edison and Michael Shannon as George Westinghouse, about the competition between Edison and Westinghouse over electrical power systems) filmed at Cragside, using its Victorian interiors and the estate’s association with electrical innovation. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018, director J.A. Bayona, starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard) used Cragside as the principal visual reference and basis for the design of Lockwood Manor, the great Victorian country house at the centre of the film’s second act.