18/06/2026
One of the best-known architectural features of Welbeck Abbey is the underground ballroom, built as part of the 5th Duke of Portland’s extensive campaign of estate building above and below ground. Originally, the underground ballroom was not designed as a ballroom at all but as a chapel and, later, as a picture gallery.
An enfilade of grand rooms connected to the ballroom were used as ‘supper rooms’ in the early 20th century, where 400 or more people could be served food during large parties hosted by the 6th Duke and Duchess Winifred. However, their predecessor originally intended for them to be places of learning and contemplation (the 5th Duke may have been pleased to know that they were used as seminar rooms by the MOD college from 1953 to 2005). In early plans, they are labelled as libraries and periodical rooms, and on some plans, one of the rooms is labelled as a ‘Museum’. This might be the ‘Bird Room’, of which some photographs survive.
Cases filled with taxidermy, including falcons, eagles and herons, lined the Bird Room, and one newspaper claimed, ‘it is believed to contain specimens of every known bird except one’. This display may have been intended to pay homage to Margaret, Duchess of Portland, a great 18th-century collector of natural history specimens, which she housed at her home in Bulstrode Park, Gloucestershire, known at the time as The Portland Museum. Unfortunately, Margaret’s collection was sold by her son, the 3rd Duke, after her death in 1785. The auction catalogue stated that it had been the Duchess’s intention ‘to have had every unknown species in the three kingdoms of nature described and published to the world’.
All that remains of Duchess Margaret’s once-great Museum, including three butterfly specimens, now fits inside a little wooden box. The birds which once filled Welbeck’s underground Bird Room are now housed at Wollaton Hall in Nottingham.
Picture credit for Bird Room: Photograph courtesy of Bassetlaw Museum
