Camellia House, Wentworth Woodhouse

According to the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust, the pavilion was built in 1738 as a tea house, where Lady Mary Finch, Marchioness of Rockingham, entertained her friends over the most fashionable drink of the day; the Heritage Fund adds that it was meant to impress her guests. It later sheltered the camellias gathered by the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam, a keen collector said to have paid the equivalent of a housemaid's yearly wage for each plant. The Wikipedia article on the estate gives a different chronology: a building mainly of the early nineteenth century, with late eighteenth-century elements, put up to house the family collection.

In the twentieth century the Camellia House remained a family retreat. After the family left in the 1980s it decayed: without a roof and with many panes missing, it was on Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register when the Preservation Trust took over the estate, sold for £7 million. The year-long, £5 million project was funded with £4 million from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and just over £614,000 from Historic England, and was carried out by Donald Insall Associates with the contractor William Birch. After an official launch on 22 March 2024, the pavilion opened to the public on 2 April.

Listed Grade II*, the Camellia House is a glass-fronted Georgian pavilion: the Heritage Fund describes it in those terms, and the estate points out that it has some of the largest Georgian sash windows in the country. Before the works only a roofless shell remained, with many of its panes gone.

The restoration added a new roof and reinstated a complete set of sash windows. It also introduced carbon-neutral heating and a rainwater harvesting system that waters the camellias and supplies the toilets. The project won a Green Apple Environmental Award in 2023 and was shortlisted for the RICS Awards in 2024. The pavilion stands in a sheltered corner of the gardens, west of the great house and close to the Ionic Temple and the Doric Lodge, both of them also listed.

The collection once numbered up to thirty camellias from Asia: the estate says they came from China, while Wikipedia speaks of plants brought from India. Nineteen survived the years of neglect, and many are thought to be original plants which, according to the estate, date from the early nineteenth century; Wikipedia dates the oldest to 1792. Five have been identified as varieties first sold in Britain between 1806 and 1822, and the International Camellia Society counts them among the oldest surviving camellias in the Western world.

The shrubs still fill the restored building, now watered with rain collected on site, and the tea house is arranged around them, so that teas from across the globe are served among camellias more than two centuries old.

The Camellia House lies in the gardens of Wentworth Woodhouse, in the village of Wentworth in the borough of Rotherham. It runs as a tea house open to the public; in the evenings it hosts events, and Mondays are kept for charities and community groups. A visit combines well with a guided tour of the house, whose East Front is famous for its exceptional length, and with the estate's follies and monuments: the Needle's Eye, Hoober Stand, the Rockingham Mausoleum and Keppel's Column. The camellias in flower give the best reason to come.