sick poor, through which he became associated with Florence Nightingale. In 1883 he was appointed as Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire, and when the London County Council was created in 1888, he became the first Lord Lieutenant of the County of London. Development of the estates The seat of the Grosvenor country estate is at Eaton Hall in Cheshire. When Grosvenor inherited the estate it was worth at least £152,000 (equivalent to £ as of ), a year. After inheriting the estate, one of his first acts was to commission a statue of his namesake, the Norman Hugh Lupus, who had been the 1st Earl of Chester, from G. F. Watts, to stand in the forecourt of the hall. In 1870 Grosvenor commissioned Alfred Waterhouse to design a new house to replace the previous hall designed by William Porden and extended by William Burn. The core of the previous hall was retained, parts were completely rebuilt and other parts were refaced and remodelled. A private wing was built as a residence for the family, and this was connected to the main hall by a corridor. Waterhouse also designed Eaton Chapel and its associated clocktower, and redesigned the stables. It is said that the hall's guests "were not greatly amused" by the carillon of 28 bells that played 28 tunes and sounded every quarter of the hour during the day and the night. The work took 12 years to complete and it cost £803,000 (equivalent to £ as of ). The hall has been described as "the most ambitious instance of Gothic Revival domestic architecture anywhere in the country", and as "a vast, cheerless, Gothic structure". Grosvenor paid for many buildings on his estates. He was a patron of the Chester architect John Douglas. Douglas' biographer, Edward Hubbard, estimated that the duke commissioned four churches and chapels, eight large houses, about 15 schools and institutions, about 50 farms (in whole or part), about 300 cottages, lodges, smithies and the like, two cheese factories, two inns, and about 12 commercial buildings (for most of which Douglas was the architect) – and these were just the buildings in the city of Chester and on the Eaton estate. He commissioned G. F. Bodley to rebuild St Mary's Church in his Cheshire estate village of Eccleston, which was completed in 1899, the year of his death. He also spent money on Grosvenor House in London and