Photo: M J Richardson · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Darby Houses

Two 18th-century homes of the Darby ironmaster family in Coalbrookdale, currently closed for repairs after flood damage.

Temporarily closed

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Temporarily closed. The National Trust states that the houses are closed because remedial work is needed after flood damage.

About the museum

The Darby Houses are two neighbouring family homes in Coalbrookdale, part of the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site, where the Darby family ran the ironworks that helped start the Industrial Revolution. They stand on the hillside so that the ironmasters could easily reach their place of work.

Dale House was built in 1717 for Abraham Darby I and looks out over the Upper Furnace Pool. Later generations of the family enlarged it, and Abraham Darby III added a third floor in 1776. In the twentieth century it was divided into flats, which damaged its historic character, and it has since been restored as far as possible to its eighteenth-century appearance.

Rosehill House was built around 1738 for Richard Ford, who married the eldest daughter of Abraham Darby I and worked as manager of the ironworks. In the mid-nineteenth century it was the home of Richard Darby and later his daughter Rebecca, who lived there until 1908. The house was restored from an uninhabitable state and refurnished to show how it looked around 1850. The houses were run by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust and passed to the National Trust in 2026.