In which Dido Belle followed me through London

Last year, I visited Kenwood House, a 17th century stately home next to Hampstead Heath, which was expanded in the 18th century when it became the home of Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, and is now open to the public (you might also recognize it as a filming location from Notting Hill).

Kenwood House

He and his wife were “childless but from about 1766 they agreed to accommodate their niece, Anne Murray, and two great-nieces, Elizabeth Murray and Dido Elizabeth Belle. Dido was the illegitimate daughter of a formerly enslaved young black woman named Maria Bell and Mansfield's nephew Sir John Lindsay. It was extremely unusual at this time for a mixed-race child to be raised not as a servant, but as part of an aristocratic British family.”