Braziers Park is a Grade II* country house and estate on the edge of Ipsden - a small village near Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England - housing a secular intentional community [1] and the School of Integrative Social Research. [2] It has also been used as a film location for large- and small-budget films. [3]
The house once belonged to Ian Fleming's family, and the room that was once Fleming's nursery is now a library. [4]
Braziers Park was built in the late 17th century (with a datestone of 1688), and modelled in the Strawberry Hill Gothic style of architecture by Daniel Harris on behalf of Isaac George Manley (1755–1837) in 1799. As a teenager, Manley had been a naval officer with Captain Cook on the first voyage of the Endeavour 1768–71; and was later Vice Admiral of the Red, and as commander of HMS Apollo captured the French corvette Legere in 1796. He was made a Rear Admiral in 1809.
In 1839, Frances Eliza (Fanny) Grenfell (1814–91), later a biographer, was living at Braziers Park with her sisters, and was visited by novelist Charles Kingsley (1819–75), then a Cambridge undergraduate. Kingsley later fictionalized this meeting as that of Argemone with Lancelot Smith in his first novel Yeast (1848). Despite Fanny having taken a vow of chastity with her sisters at Braziers Park, she and Kingsley married in Bath in 1844.
Valentine Fleming, Member of Parliament for Henley, made substantial changes to the house when he bought it in 1906. His son Ian Fleming, the novelist, briefly lived at the house when very young.
Sir Ernest Moon (1854–1930), counsel to the Speaker of the House of Commons, bought the house from Fleming in 1911, and his widow Lady Moon sold the house to Norman Glaister (1883–1961) in 1950.
Glaister set up the School of Integrative Social Research, which still exists at the site. Glaister had been involved in the Grith Fyrd barter for work system. The School, which in part functioned as a commune, aimed “to explore the dynamics of people living in groups, to develop better methods of interpersonal communication and to find new ways of combining knowledge to make it more meaningful.”
An important member of the community was Robert Glynn Faithfull (died 1996), who had met Glaister through the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry and who was viewed by the community as one of Glaister's successors. [5] Faithfull was an academic at the University of Liverpool who studied the Italian Renaissance and had been in British espionage during the Second World War. He was married to Baroness Eva Erisso, a former ballerina. Their daughter, the singer and actress Marianne Faithfull, spent some of her early life in the community. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones came to stay with Marianne Faithfull at Braziers Park after his release from prison in 1967 as her then boyfriend. In her autobiography she described Braziers Park as a “mixture of high utopian thoughts and randy sex”. Marianne's half-brother Simon Faithfull grew up at Braziers Park.
Braziers Park is now home to around 20 people, some of whom live communally, and runs educational courses. In August 1996 the first of the annual Braziers International Artists' Workshop was held. [4] It is the site of the annual Wood music festival that began in May 2008. Braziers is also a registered "LAND Learner" site under the UK Permaculture Association. [6]
Sense and Sensibility is the first novel by the English author Jane Austen, published in 1811. It was published anonymously; By A Lady appears on the title page where the author's name might have been. It tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne as they come of age. They have an older half-brother, John, and a younger sister, Margaret.
Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded, followed by Cecilia (1782). Most of her stage plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889, forty-nine years after her death.
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British writer, best known for his postwar James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing.
Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience. The term was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who formulated the concept in opposition to modern industrialized methods, instead adopting a more traditional or "natural" approach to agriculture.
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull is an English rock singer. She achieved popularity in the 1960s with the release of her hit single "As Tears Go By" and became one of the lead female artists during the British Invasion in the United States.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1966.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1811.
Ormskirk is a market town in the West Lancashire district of Lancashire, England. It is located 13 miles (21 km) north of Liverpool, 11 miles (18 km) northwest of St Helens, 9 miles (14 km) southeast of Southport and 18 miles (29 km) southwest of Preston. Ormskirk is known for its gingerbread. In 2011 it had a population of 24,073.
Cheyne Walk is a historic road in Chelsea, London, England, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It runs parallel with the River Thames. Before the construction of Chelsea Embankment reduced the width of the Thames here, it fronted the river along its whole length.
Angelo Daniel Badalamenti was an American composer and arranger best known for his work in composing for films. He is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with director David Lynch, notably the scores for Blue Velvet (1986), the Twin Peaks television series, The Straight Story (1999), and Mulholland Drive (2001).
Kingsley Hall is a community centre, in Powis Road, Bromley-by-Bow in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It dates back to the work of Doris and Muriel Lester, who had a nursery school in nearby Bruce Road. Their brother, Kingsley Lester, died aged 26 in 1914, leaving money for work in the local area for "educational, social and recreational" purposes, with which the Lesters bought and converted a disused chapel. The current Hall was built with a stone-laying ceremony taking place on 14 July 1927.
Otterbourne is a village in Hampshire, England. It is located approximately four miles (6.4 km) south of Winchester and eight miles (13 km) north of Southampton. At the 2011 census, its population was 1,539, and there were 626 dwellings.
Talitha Dina Getty was a Dutch actress, socialite, and model who was regarded as a style icon of the late 1960s. She lived much of her adult life in Britain and, in her final years, was closely associated with the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. Her husband was the oil heir and subsequent philanthropist John Paul Getty Jr.
Before the Poison is the 16th studio album by British singer Marianne Faithfull, recorded in 2003 and released in 2004.
King's College School, also known as Wimbledon, KCS, King's and KCS Wimbledon, is an independent day school in Wimbledon, southwest London, England. The school was established in 1829 by King George IV, as the junior department of King's College London and had part of the school's premises in Strand, prior to relocating to Wimbledon in 1897.
Simon Faithfull is an English artist based in Berlin and London. His work has been widely exhibited in both international solo and group exhibitions, including Musee des Beaux Arts (Calais), Fabrica (Brighton,) FRAC Basse Normandie (France), The British Film Institute Gallery, London; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; CRAC Alsace, France, Stills, Edinburgh; and the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 as part of ArtSway's New Forest Pavilion.
Onslow Square is a garden square in South Kensington, London, England.
A community orchard is a collection of fruit trees shared by communities and growing in publicly accessible areas such as public greenspaces, parks, schools, churchyards, allotments or, in the US, abandoned lots. Such orchards are a shared resource and not managed for personal or business profit. Income may be generated to sustain the orchard as a charity, community interest company, or other non-profit structure. What they have in common is that they are cared for by a community of people.
Marianne Francis (1790–1832) was an English evangelical, now known principally as a correspondent of Hester Piozzi and Sarah Wesley. She has been called an "evangelical bluestocking", and is recognised as a significant participant in debate about religious enthusiasm.
51°33′17″N1°04′59″W / 51.55465°N 1.083068°W
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