Old English Court

The Old English Court on Varvarka Street consists of ancient chambers dating from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, generally considered the oldest surviving foreign-mission building in Moscow. It housed the office of the English Muscovy trading company, and during diplomatic visits the chambers served as the ambassadors' residence. Since September 2020 the chambers have been part of the landscape and architectural complex of Zaryadye Park.

The white-stone chambers were built in the fifteenth century for the court chamberlain Ivan Bobrishchev, nicknamed Yushka, and later, left without heirs, the building passed to the treasury. In 1553 the navigator Richard Chancellor discovered the northern sea route from England to Russia, and three years later Ivan the Terrible granted English merchants the right to trade freely and duty-free in all Russian towns. On this basis the Muscovy Company was founded in London, and a house on Varvarka Street in Zaryadye was allotted for its office. The English imported weapons, gunpowder, lead, and cloth, and exported timber, hemp, wax, and furs; the embassy received a daily allowance of a quarter of a beef carcass, sheep, chickens, bread, and wine.

Besides the formal chambers, the house had spacious storerooms, where goods were hoisted up by a simple block-and-tackle straight to a window on the upper floor. In 1612 an entryway was added to the chambers, and the south façade received new decoration. In 1636 the company acquired a larger compound in Bely Gorod, and the property on Varvarka came to be known as the Old English Court. Trade ties were severed in 1649, when the execution of King Charles I caused a diplomatic break: Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich expelled the English merchants and confiscated the company's property.

After this, the boyar Ivan Miloslavsky owned the chambers for twenty years, after which the building reverted to the treasury and was later given over as a residence for the Metropolitan of Nizhny Novgorod. In the early eighteenth century Peter the Great founded one of Russia's first schools of arithmetic within these walls, and from the mid-eighteenth century the estate belonged to merchant families who continually rebuilt the house. By the mid-twentieth century the chambers' original appearance was considered irretrievably lost; from 1949 to 1966 the Library of Foreign Literature operated here.

The building's fate was changed by restorer Pyotr Baranovsky: in the 1960s, as the Zaryadye district's buildings were being demolished, he recognized genuine ancient chambers beneath later additions and saved the landmark from a planned car ramp construction. Following research conducted in 1968–1969, architects Inessa Kazakevich and Yevgenia Zhavoronkova reconstructed the building's appearance close to that of the late sixteenth century in 1970–1972, restoring window openings that had been widened and decoration that had been lost.

The Old English Court Museum opened on October 18, 1994, as a branch of the Museum of Moscow History; the ceremony was graced by the presence of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, who were on a state visit to Russia at the time. The formal Treasury Chamber today regularly hosts concerts of early music, and the building itself remains a rare monument to the trade ties between medieval Rus' and Europe.