Sutton House, at 2 and 4 Homerton High Street, is the oldest domestic building in the East End of London. It only acquired its name in 1953, in the belief that it had been the house that Sir Thomas Sutton, the philanthropist and founder of Charterhouse School, moved to from Stoke Newington. This was in fact the house next door, which was demolished in 1805. It was built between 1533 and 1535, as a three-storey ‘bryk place’ by a Privy Councillor, Sir Ralph Sadleir of Standon (1507–1587), of whom there is a portrait in the house on loan from a descendant. By 1550, Sir Ralph, with an increasingly large family, had sold the house to a wealthy wool merchant of Westmoreland origin, John Machell (c.1509–1558). It continued to be occupied variously by a Huguenot widow, Mrs Edmund Tooke; merchants; by schools, after it was divided into two, one of whose most celebrated pupil was the novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and a recreational men’s club. In 1938 it was bought by the National Trust after a public appeal led by George Lansbury, Labour MP for Poplar and Vice-President of the Trust, and with funds from a bequest in memory of the brothers Robertson, who had both been killed in the First World War.