Leeds Castle

Leeds Castle stands on islands in a lake formed by the River Len near the village of Leeds in Kent, England, about seven miles southeast of Maidstone, and takes its name from that village rather than from the city of Leeds in West Yorkshire. A wooden Saxon stronghold occupied the site from 857, and Robert de Crevecoeur rebuilt it in stone as a Norman fortress in 1119; the castle standing today dates mostly from an early nineteenth-century remodeling completed in 1823 that overlaid the surviving medieval and Tudor fabric with Tudor-style features. Its last private owner, Olive, Lady Baillie, left it in trust in 1974, and the Leeds Castle Foundation has owned and opened it to the public since 1976; it was listed Grade I in 1952 and drew over 468,000 visitors in 2025.