Cragside is a Victorian Tudor Revival country house near the town of Rothbury in Northumberland, England. It was the home of William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong, founder of the Armstrong Whitworth armaments firm. An industrial magnate, scientist, philanthropist and inventor of the hydraulic crane and the Armstrong gun, Armstrong also displayed his inventiveness in the domestic sphere, making Cragside the first house in the world to be lit using hydroelectric power. The estate was technologically advanced; the architect of the house, Richard Norman Shaw, wrote that it was equipped with "wonderful hydraulic machines that do all sorts of things". In the grounds, Armstrong built dams and lakes to power a sawmill, a water-powered laundry, early versions of a dishwasher and a dumb waiter, a hydraulic lift and a hydroelectric rotisserie. In 1887, Armstrong was raised to the peerage, the first engineer or scientist to be ennobled, and became Baron Armstrong of Cragside.
"Truly the palace of a modern magician" – the Victorian periodical The World describes Armstrong and his house
Armstrong in the 1870s
The top-lit Gallery, formerly Armstrong's museum
The entrance front – Shaw's "Wagnerian" overture
Tudor Revival architecture
Tudor Revival architecture, also known as mock Tudor in the UK, first manifested in domestic architecture in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th century. Based on revival of aspects that were perceived as Tudor architecture, in reality it usually took the style of English vernacular architecture of the Middle Ages that had survived into the Tudor period.
Half-timbering, Gothic Revival tracery and Jacobean carved porch brackets combine in the Tudor Revival Beaney Institute, Canterbury, built in 1899
Vine Cottage, Blaise Hamlet, John Nash, 1812
Dalmeny House near Edinburgh, 1817, by William Wilkins
The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota, built 1928–1930