Welford Park: A Country House and Estate in Berkshire
Site at a Glance
- Popularity
- Very High
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- English
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page8 sections
History
Welford Park is a country house and estate in the village of Welford, Berkshire, England. The present house was built around 1652 and remodelled around 1700 in the Baroque style, a European architectural mode known for dramatic forms and ornament.
Monastic estate and Tudor residence
From Anglo-Saxon times, the site formed part of a monastic grange, an agricultural estate belonging to a monastery. It belonged to Abingdon Abbey, a medieval Benedictine monastery. After Henry VIII’s suppression and confiscation of England’s monasteries, known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries, he used the property as a hunting lodge.
Queen Elizabeth I granted Welford to Sir Thomas Parry, an English courtier and politician, who made it his principal residence. After Parry’s son moved the family to Hamstead Marshall, the house became a dower house, a residence for Parry’s widowed mother. She was buried in the adjoining church.
Jones and Archer families
Richard Jones purchased the property in 1618. The Oxford architect John Jackson designed the existing house for him. Jones was a grandson of Sir Francis Jones, who served as Lord Mayor of London in 1620. When Richard died without a male heir, his daughter Mary inherited the family connection to the estate and married John Archer in 1680. Their son-in-law, architect Thomas Archer, carried out the remodelling, although he was not related to the Archer family.
In 1706, the property passed through marriage to William Eyre on the condition that he adopt the Archer surname. In 1800 it passed to Member of Parliament John Houblon, who took the name Archer-Houblon. The estate later went to his younger son Charles, who resumed the surname Eyre.
Later ownership and use
The interior was altered in 1840. The house was let to tenants from 1891 and served as a convalescent home during the First World War. It passed by marriage to John Puxley in 1954 and remains in the ownership of his son James Puxley. Welford Park is a Grade I-listed building, the highest category of listed-building protection in England.
Remains
The estate includes the country house, the adjoining church, chalk streams that form the River Lambourn, and riverside woodland.
The house
The house’s remodelling added a storey and gave its facade Ionic columns, a classical form distinguished by scroll-shaped capitals. The interior was altered in the nineteenth century.
Welford St Gregory
The adjoining church of Welford St Gregory has a round tower. It is one of only two surviving round-tower churches in Berkshire.
Streams and woodland
Chalk streams, fed by groundwater flowing through chalk, run through the grounds and form the River Lambourn. Beech woodland beside the river has carpets of snowdrops and smaller numbers of aconites, early-flowering plants that thrive in the chalky soil.
