Norbury Park is an area of mixed wooded and agricultural land surrounding a privately owned Georgian manor house near Leatherhead and Dorking, Surrey. On the west bank of the River Mole, it is close to the village of Mickleham.
The park is Grade II listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. [1] It is part of the Mole Gap to Reigate Escarpment Special Area of Conservation [2] and a Site of Special Scientific Interest. [3]
A small Bronze Age hoard consisting of two palstave axes and a scabbard chape dating from around 1150-1000 BC was discovered in 2003 in woodland on the western side of the park. [4] The park also contains, at Druids Grove marked on Ordnance Survey maps, an important grove of yew trees apocryphally used by Druids for rituals and ceremony. They are some of the oldest trees of Great Britain. The manor was also known as Northbury for some time. [5]
The estate is not named in Domesday Book, however there are two entries for Mickleham and it is thought that the second of these relates to Norbury Park. [6] In 1086, the land was held by Oswald as mesne lord to the tenant-in-chief, Richard son of Gilbert. It included five ploughlands, 1 acre (0.4 ha) of meadow and rendered £6 per year. [7] The estate was one of several local manors comprising the Honour of Clare that had been created for Richard fitz Gilbert by William I as a reward for his support during the Norman Conquest. [6] Oswald, the lesser tenant, was a 'conforming Saxon', who had held the land during the reign of Edward the Confessor. [6]
The Park was owned for two centuries by the Stydolf family and the diarist John Evelyn records a visit in August 1655 to both Box Hill, Surrey and Norbury Park, which was then owned by Sir Francis Stydolf. Sir Francis' son Richard, who was created a baronet by Charles II subsequently inherited the estate and on his death it passed to his daughter, who married Thomas Tryon of Leatherhead. The estate remained in the Tryon family until 1766 when Charles Tryon (father of William Tryon, then Governor of Province of North Carolina) sold the estate to William Locke, a London art critic. Locke was responsible for the abandonment of the original site of the manor house on the floodplain of the River Mole and the construction of the current house, designed in 1774 by the architect Thomas Sandby. [5] Locke also invited J. M. W. Turner to the estate to paint; a watercolour entitled Beech Trees at Norbury Park (1797) is held by the National Gallery of Ireland. [8]
Locke died in 1810 and his family left Norbury Park in 1819. [5] Ebenezer Fuller Maitland, the former MP for Wallingford, purchased the house in around 1822, and later exchanged it for Park Place, Remenham, Berkshire, with Henry Piper Sperling. Sperling remained at Norbury Park for 24 years and was responsible for developing the gardens around the House, including the building of Weir Bridge over the River Mole, which still stands today and is Grade II* listed. [9]
Norbury Park was purchased by Thomas Grissell in 1850. It was during his ownership that the railway line from Leatherhead to Dorking was built. Grissell insisted that the three viaducts over the River Mole be built with coloured brickwork with decorative cornices and cast-iron parapets. Similarly, the 480 m-long (520 yd) Mickleham Tunnel was bored through the chalk with no vertical ventilation shafts. [10] When the line opened in 1867, Grissell secured the right to stop on request any train passing through the railway station at Westhumble, a concession that was abolished by the Transport Act 1962. The station was designed by Charles Henry Driver in the Châteauesque style and included steeply pitched roofs with patterned tiles and an ornamental turret topped with a decorative grille and weather vane. [11]
Leopold Salomons purchased Norbury Park in 1890. [6] He is best known for his gift of Box Hill to the nation in 1914, [12] but he also funded the addition of a vestry to St Michael's Chapel in Westhumble. [13] He died on 23 September 1915. [12] The Norbury Park estate appears to have been partly broken up by the executors of Salomons' will. The house, stud farm and 634 acres (2.57 km2) of parkland were purchased by Sir William Corry in September 1916. [14] In August 1922 he sold the property to Sir Edward Mountain, the chairman and managing director of the Eagle Star Insurance Company. [15]
At the urging of James Chuter Ede, [16] Surrey County Council bought 1,340 acres (5.4 km2) of Norbury Park in July 1930, for which the estate's total purchase price was £97,000 (equivalent to £7,746,129in 2023), to protect the land from development. [17] The council could find only part of the price, and a public appeal for more donations was unsuccessful, so the house was sold privately, while the parkland remained Council property, as it is today. Chuter Ede said he hoped the acquisition was one of the most pleasant and enduring memorials of his life's work. [18] The parkland is managed on the council's behalf by the Surrey Wildlife Trust. [19]
Marie Stopes, the British British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights., lived at Norbury Park House from 1938 to 1958. She had been an active proponent of sexual education and birth control in the early twentieth century; her book Married Love , published in 1918, was the first sexual manual written in language simple enough to be accessible to a wide public. In 1921 she opened the first birth control clinic in London. On her death in 1958 she bequeathed the Park to the Royal Society of Literature, of which she was a member. The house was subsequently sold to Philip Spencer, an industrialist. [20]
Norbury Park House was designed in the Palladian style by Thomas Sandby for William Locke in 1774 [5] [6] and was extended by the architect, Peter Frederick Robinson, in 1820. [21]
The entrance front, which faces northeast, has five windows on the first floor. The projecting porch is supported on either side of the main door by a pair of Doric columns. [21] [22] The hall has a stone floor with a stone staircase, which has a mahogany handrail and iron balustrades. The oldest fireplace in the house is made from chalk and may have been taken from the previous manor house. [22]
The drawing room is decorated with the work of four artists, all commissioned by Locke: George Barrett Sr., to paint three landscapes on the walls; Benedetto Pastorini painted a representation of the sky on the ceiling; additional features were painted by Sawrey Gilpin and Giovani Cipriani. [5] [22] In the evening, light enters the room from the window, shining in the same direction as the sunset depicted in the landscape on the western wall. [21]
The park has three tenanted farms: Norbury Park Farm (east of the house), Swanworth Farm (to the south) and Bocketts Farm to the north. [23] Norbury Blue cheese is named after the park. [24] The blue cheese was made at the Dairy at Norbury Park farm until 2018, when production moved to Sherbourne Farm at Albury. [25] Norbury Park Sawmill, around 220 m (240 yd) from the western side of the house, opened in the 1970s and closed in 2021. [1] [26]
Dorking is a market town in Surrey in South East England about 21 mi (34 km) south of London. It is in Mole Valley District and the council headquarters are to the east of the centre. The High Street runs roughly east–west, parallel to the Pipp Brook and along the northern face of an outcrop of Lower Greensand. The town is surrounded on three sides by the Surrey Hills National Landscape and is close to Box Hill and Leith Hill.
Leatherhead is a town in the Mole Valley district of Surrey, England, about 17 mi (27 km) south of Central London. The settlement grew up beside a ford on the River Mole, from which its name is thought to derive. During the late Anglo-Saxon period, Leatherhead was a royal vill and is first mentioned in the will of Alfred the Great in 880 AD. The first bridge across the Mole may have been constructed in around 1200 and this may have coincided with the expansion of the town and the enlargement of the parish church.
Great Bookham is a village in the Mole Valley district, in Surrey, England, one of six semi-urban spring line settlements between the towns of Leatherhead and Guildford. With the narrow strip parish of Little Bookham, it forms part of the Saxon settlement of Bocham. The Bookhams are surrounded by common land, and Bookham railway station in Church Road, Great Bookham, serves both settlements.
The River Mole is a tributary of the River Thames in southern England. It rises in West Sussex near Gatwick Airport and flows north-west through Surrey for 80 km to the Thames at Hampton Court Palace. The river gives its name to the Surrey district of Mole Valley.
Mole Valley is a local government district in Surrey, England. Its council is based in Dorking, and the district's other town is Leatherhead. The largest villages are Ashtead, Fetcham and Great Bookham, in the northern third of the district.
Box Hill is a summit of the North Downs in Surrey, approximately 31 km (19 mi) south-west of London. It is named after the ancient box woodland found on the steepest west-facing chalk slopes overlooking the River Mole. The western part of the hill is owned and managed by the National Trust, whilst the village of Box Hill lies on higher ground to the east. The highest point is Betchworth Clump at 224 m (735 ft) above OD, although the Salomons Memorial overlooking the town of Dorking is the most popular viewpoint.
The A24 is a major road in England that runs for 53.2 miles (85.6 km) from Clapham in south-west London to Worthing on the English Channel in West Sussex via the suburbs of south-west London, as well as through the counties of Surrey and West Sussex.
Mickleham is a village in south east England, between the towns of Dorking and Leatherhead in Surrey. The civil parish covers 7.31 square kilometres and includes the hamlet of Fredley. The larger ecclesiastical parish includes the majority of the neighbouring village of Westhumble, from which Mickleham is separated by the River Mole.
The Sutton and Mole Valley lines were constructed between 1847 and 1868 by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, the London and South Western Railway and the LBSCR-sponsored Horsham, Dorking and Leatherhead Railway.
Mole Valley is a former constituency in Surrey represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 1997 by Sir Paul Beresford, a Conservative, until it was abolished in 2024, primarily replaced by Dorking and Horley.
Betchworth is a village and civil parish in the Mole Valley district of Surrey, England. The village centre is on the north bank of the River Mole and south of the A25 road, almost 3 miles (4.8 km) east of Dorking and 3 miles (4.8 km) west of Reigate. London is 19.5 miles (31.4 km) north of the village.
Westhumble is a village in south east England, approximately 2 km (1.2 mi) north of Dorking, Surrey. The village is not part of a civil parish, however the majority of the settlement is in the ecclesiastical Parish of Mickleham.
Bocketts Farm in Surrey, England is a visitor attraction farm set in the countryside on the slopes of the North Downs 1.6 miles (2.6 km) due south of Leatherhead.
Headley is a village and civil parish in the North Downs in Surrey, England. The nearest settlements are, to the west, Mickleham and Leatherhead; to the north, Ashtead and Langley Vale; to the east, Walton-on-the-Hill; and to the south, Box Hill. It is just outside the M25 motorway encircling London.
Box Hill & Westhumble is a railway station in the village of Westhumble in Surrey, England, approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) north of Dorking town centre. Box Hill is located approximately 1⁄2 mile (800 m) to the east. It is 21 miles 14 chains (34.1 km) down the line from London Waterloo. Train services are operated by Southern who manage the station, and South Western Railway.
Burford Bridge Hotel is a historic hotel at the edge of the village of Mickleham, Surrey, England. It is to the south of Leatherhead and north of Dorking at the foot of Box Hill on the River Mole.
Leopold Salomons was a city financier and company director active in the City of London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Salomons was born into a British Jewish family, but it has been suggested that he later converted to Christianity. Today he is primarily remembered for his purchase of Box Hill in 1914 to protect it from development.
The Mole Gap Trail is a 10-kilometre (6.2 mi) official walking route alongside the River Mole, linking the Surrey towns of Dorking and Leatherhead. The trail is marked on Ordnance Survey maps. The trail runs through Norbury Park, the village of Westhumble and across Denbies Wine Estate.
Dorking and Horley is a new constituency of the House of Commons in the UK Parliament. Further to the completion of the 2023 Periodic Review of Westminster constituencies, it was first contested in the 2024 general election, since when it has been represented by Chris Coghlan of the Liberal Democrats.
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