Woburn Abbey is home to the Russell family who have lived at Woburn for almost 450 years. Woburn is situated in Bedfordshire and the oldest part of the present house dates from late in JAMES I's reign, when the 4th Earl started transforming the religious foundation acquired by his great-grandfather into a nobleman's seat. The north wing was the first to be completed. The west wing followed between 1747 and 1761 and the southern and eastern ones were put up a generation later by Henry Holland, architect of that other temple of Whiggism Brooks's. The Far East provides a certain unifying influence, with both a Chinese room among Flitcroft's state apartments and a Dairy in the Chinese taste by Holland in the grounds. Holland's library is considered his best work in the actual house.

The present Duke is sometimes described as the first landed proprietor in Britain to go into the stately home business. That is not strictly accurate, since the Thynnes threw Longleat open to the public soon after the War. What the present Duke did grasp was that the public's appetite for boiseries, the classical orders and plastered ceilings was strictly limited, and that an ancestral estate's inmates, whether himself or his deer and hippopotami, were what really drew the crowds. Accordingly he developed something of a cult of personality in the 1950s and 1960s.