Lost Heritage

Location		nr Whitchurch
Year demolished		1965
Reason		Fire
See all images:		Gallery
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Throughout its history, Hurstbourne Park has witnessed many phases – monastic tenancy, gentlemanly ownership, aristocratic grandeur, wartime repurposing, and modern revival. Each era left its mark on the architecture and landscape. Today, while the original mansions are gone, the legacy of Hurstbourne Park endures in its historic parkland and remaining structures, offering a factual chronicle of an English country estate’s evolution over nearly a millennium.

Hurstbourne Park originated as the manor of Hurstbourne Priors in Hampshire, which was held by the Priory of St. Swithun (Winchester) in the Middle Ages. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century, the estate passed into private hands. By the mid-1500s it was owned by the Oxenbridge family – Sir Robert Oxenbridge (d. 1574) served as Lord of the Manor and is commemorated in the local church. His grandson, another Sir Robert Oxenbridge (1595–1638), inherited Hurstbourne Priors but sold it in 1636 for £1,747 to Sir Henry Wallop of Farleigh Wallop. This sale brought Hurstbourne into the Wallop family, who would later be ennobled as the Earls of Portsmouth.

Sir Henry Wallop died around 1678 and was succeeded by his sons; ultimately his grandson John Wallop became Viscount Lymington and was created the 1st Earl of Portsmouth in 1743. The Wallop family would retain ownership for nearly three centuries, making Hurstbourne Park their principal seat.

The first mansion at Hurstbourne Priors (the original Hurstbourne Park house) was a substantial gentry house of the Tudor/Stuart period. King James I visited the manor in 1603, indicating the house’s prominence by the early 17th century. Little documentation survives of this first house’s architecture, but it likely had the character of an Elizabethan or Jacobean country manor. In the early 18th century, the 1st Earl commissioned architect Thomas Archer – one of the few English Baroque architects – to design an ambitious new residence and landscape for Hurstbourne. Archer drew up plans in 1712, but these plans were apparently not executed; two paintings by Jan Griffier the Younger show that the house that remained was much plainer than Archer’s grand design. One surviving structure from this era is the so-called Bee House, a brick garden pavilion (later converted to a dwelling) which may have been designed by Archer around 1712 as part of his scheme. The first mansion itself endured into the late 18th century, when it was either demolished or destroyed by fire to make way for a new house.

The 18th-Century Wyatt mansion (second house)

In the 1770s the estate was inherited by John Wallop, 2nd Earl of Portsmouth, who embarked on building a completely new mansion. From 1780 to 1785, a large Georgian country house was erected on the site, built by contractor John Meadows and designed by the renowned architect James Wyatt. Wyatt was a leading architect of the late Georgian era (a rival of Robert Adam), known for his neoclassical designs, and he gave Hurstbourne Park a fashionable new house in the taste of the period. The Wyatt-designed mansion (often referred to as the second house) was likely a grand symmetrical building of Neo-Classical character, befitting an 18th-century earl’s seat. It stood amidst extensive parkland improvements: notably, the famous landscape designer Lancelot “Capability” Brown had been employed earlier in the century (c.1740) to lay out the park and pleasure grounds in the naturalistic English landscape style. The estate featured a medieval deer park (dating to the 14th century) which was incorporated into Brown’s landscape design.

Under the Wallop family, Hurstbourne Park’s Wyatt mansion became a center of social life in Hampshire. Surviving letters of Jane Austen, for example, recount her attending a ball there in 1800. The 2nd Earl died in 1797, and his successors (including John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, and later earls) kept the estate. A significant episode in the house’s history was the residency of the 3rd Earl, who was declared legally insane – he was kept under care at Hurstbourne Park for many years in the early 19th century, an episode which later became notorious in Georgian legal history (the subject of the book *The Trials of the King of Hampshire*). Despite such dramas within its walls, the Wyatt mansion stood for over a century as an imposing Georgian house.

By the late 19th century, however, this house’s fate met a dramatic end. In 1891, a catastrophic fire broke out and the entire Wyatt-built mansion was burned down. The incident proved fatal to the head of the family: Isaac Newton Wallop, 5th Earl of Portsmouth (a descendant who was then the owner) died just a few months after the fire, in 1891. With the ancestral home in ruins, his son Newton Wallop, 6th Earl of Portsmouth moved quickly to rebuild a new house on the same site - but it was also not to last.

Read the history and dramatic loss of the second Hurstbourne Park.