Exbury House, Hampshire | |
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General information | |
Type | Country House |
Location | Exbury and Lepe, Hampshire, England |
Coordinates | 50°47′55″N1°24′00″W / 50.798505°N 1.400004°W |
Designations | Grade II* listed |
Exbury House is an English country house in Exbury and Lepe, Hampshire, situated on the edge of the New Forest.
It is a Grade II* listed building [1] with associated Grade II* listed parkland and gardens. [2]
The house consists of an 18th-century core which was redesigned and refaced in 1927. Constructed of brick and ashlar with a slate roof, it has a rectangular floor plan (with one corner sliced off), three storeys and a parapet around the roof. The long side garden frontage has nine bays and a colonnaded entrance. The main entrance front on the sliced-off corner has five bays.
The gardens (see Exbury Gardens) were laid out by Lionel de Rothschild between 1919 and 1939 and contain specialist collections of rhododendrons and other species. Whilst the gardens are open to the public, the house is not. [3]
Exbury Manor dates from the 13th century. It belonged to the Berkeley family in the 15th century and the Compton family of Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire in the 16th. In 1708 it passed to William Mitford and thence down to his grandson, the historian William Mitford (1744–1827). On the latter's death it passed directly to his grandson Henry Reveley Mitford (1804–1883), whose father had been drowned at sea in 1803 after his ship hit Bell Rock. It was sold to Major John Forster in the early 1880s, but after his death in 1886, it was let to Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Lady Clementine (née Ogilvy) in the 1880s. [4] Major Forster also let the house to George Stucley for a number of years. Financier Lionel de Rothschild in 1919.
Rothschild remodelled and upgraded the house, developed the gardens and extended the village of Exbury. He died in 1942 and the house was requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a headquarters to prepare for Operation Neptune. The house was designated as HMS Mastodon from May 1942 to July 1945, HMS King Alfred January to June 1946, then HMS Hawke from August 1946 to 1955. [5]
The house was finally returned to the Rothschild family in 1955 and Rothschild's son Edmund was able to renew the plant breeding program. The house itself was not reoccupied as a private residence until 1989.
The gardens have been open to the public since 1950, run since 1988 by Exbury Gardens Ltd on a long lease from the Rothschild family.
Janet Prentice, the heroine of Nevil Shute's novel Requiem for a Wren , finds herself, as a Wren specialist in landing craft guns, assigned to HMS Mastodon in 1943. In the novel, Shute identifies Mastodon as Exbury, and describes the wonder of Prentice and a fellow Wren when they first arrive at the grand river-front house and explore its gardens. Among other things, they find underground irrigation systems, carefully labelled plants, and "... a rock garden half as large as Trafalgar Square that was a mass of bloom ..." All of this, says Shute, was tended by a gardening staff that "... had been reduced from fifty to a mere eighteen old men."
William Mitford was an English historian, landowner, and politician. His best known work is The History of Greece, published in ten volumes between 1784 and 1810.
In the 19th century members of the English Rothschild family bought and built many country houses in the home counties, furnishing them with the art the family collected. The area of the Vale of Aylesbury, where many of the houses were situated, became known as "Rothchildshire". In the 20th century many of these properties were sold off with their art collections dispersed. Today only Eythrope House still belongs to the family; however, they still retain influence in how Ascott House and Waddesdon Manor are managed. In the loss of country houses in the 20th century only Aston Clinton was lost.
Halton House is a country house in the Chiltern Hills above the village of Halton in Buckinghamshire, England. It was built for Alfred Freiherr de Rothschild between 1880 and 1883. It is used as the main officers' mess for RAF Halton and is listed Grade II* on the National Heritage List for England.
Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, was a British diplomat, collector and writer, whose most notable work is Tales of Old Japan (1871). Nicknamed "Bertie", he was the paternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters.
Exbury is a village in Hampshire, England. It is in the civil parish of Exbury and Lepe. It lies just in the New Forest, near the Beaulieu River and about a mile from the Solent coast. It is best known as the location of Exbury House, built by the Rothschild family, and the famous Exbury Gardens. The Rothschild family still have significant land ownings in the area.
Exbury Gardens is a 200-acre (81 ha) informal woodland garden in Hampshire, England with large collections of rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias, and is often considered the finest garden of its type in the United Kingdom. Exbury holds the national collection of Nyssa (Tupelo) and Oxydendrum under the National Plant Collection scheme run by the Plant Heritage charity. The gardens are rated Grade II* on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
Major Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, OBE was a British banker and Conservative politician best remembered as the creator of Exbury Gardens by the New Forest in Hampshire. He was the eldest son of Leopold de Rothschild (1845–1917) and a part of the prominent Rothschild banking family of England. In 1910, he was elected to the House of Commons. In 1917, he co-founded the anti-Zionist League of British Jews.
Gunnersbury Park is a park between Acton, Brentford, Chiswick and Ealing, West London, England. Purchased for the nation from the Rothschild family, it was opened to the public by Neville Chamberlain, then Minister of Health, on 21 May 1926. The park is currently jointly managed by Hounslow and Ealing borough councils. A major restoration project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund was completed in 2018. The park and garden is Grade II listed.
Tring Park Mansion or Mansion House, Tring Park, is a large country house in Tring, Hertfordshire. The house, as "Tring Park", was used, and from 1872 owned, by members of the Rothschild family from 1838 to 1945.
The Rothschild banking family of England is the British branch of the Rothschild family. It was founded in 1798 by Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), who first settled in Manchester before moving to London, Kingdom of Great Britain. He was sent there from his home in Frankfurt by his father, Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812). Wanting his sons to succeed on their own and to expand the family business across Europe, Mayer Amschel Rothschild had his eldest son remain in Frankfurt, while his four other sons were sent to different European cities to establish a financial institution to invest in business and provide banking services. Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the third son, first established a textile jobbing business in Manchester and from there went on to establish N M Rothschild & Sons bank in London.
Anthony Gustav de Rothschild was a British banker and member of the Rothschild family.
Major Edmund Leopold de Rothschild was an English financier, a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family of England, and a recipient of the Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH), given by the Royal Horticultural Society.
Curzon Street is a street in Mayfair, London, within the W1J postcode district, that ranges from Fitzmaurice Place, past Shepherd Market, to Park Lane. It is named after Sir Nathaniel Curzon, 2nd Baronet, who inherited the landholding during 1715. More houses were built there during the 1720s.
Sir Alfred Lane Beit, 2nd Baronet, was a British Conservative Party politician, art collector and philanthropist and honorary Irish citizen.
Baron Guy Édouard Alphonse Paul de Rothschild was a French banker and member of the Rothschild banking family of France. Between 1967 and 1979, he was the chairman of the French Banque Rothschild, nationalized by the French government in 1982, and maintained investments in other French and foreign companies, including Imerys. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1985.
Requiem For A Wren is a novel by Nevil Shute. It was first published in 1955 by William Heinemann Ltd. It was published in the United States under the title The Breaking Wave.
Asthall Manor is a gabled Jacobean Cotswold manor house in Asthall, Oxfordshire. It was built in about 1620 and altered and enlarged in about 1916. The house is Grade II listed on the National Heritage List for England.
Ashton Wold is a 54.0-hectare (133-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) east of the market town Oundle in Northamptonshire.
The Rothschild family is a European family of German Jewish origin that established European banking and finance houses from the late eighteenth century.
Ambrose Christian Congreve was an Irish industrialist, best known for his world-famous garden at Mount Congreve.
"On the 2d April, at Exbury House, Westgate-on-Sea, the place of Mr. and Lady Clementine Mitford, Lady Blanche Hozier, of a son and daughter.