Ashridge, Chiltern Hills, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

A medieval monastic college, founded in 1283 at Ashridge, and owning a roughly 50 hectare deer park, was dissolved in 1539, becoming a royal residence for Henry VIII's children and passing to the Princess Elizabeth after her father's death. Thomas Egerton, Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chancellor, bought the estate in 1604, incorporating the former monastic buildings within his own domestic buildings. His son John purchased an earldom following his father's death in 1617 and assumed the title Bridgewater. The fourth Earl (died 1745) became the first Duke of Bridgewater, and his younger son, Francis, the third Duke (died 1803), also known as the Canal Duke, consolidated the family fortunes by developing canals during the late 18th century. He employed Henry Holland (1745-1806) in the 1760s to build a new house on the site of the present orangery, employing Lancelot Brown (1716-83) from 1759 to 1768 to improve the parkland. John Egerton, the seventh Earl, employed James Wyatt (1747-1813) from 1808 to build a new house on the site of the adjacent monastic buildings, the Holland house being subsequently demolished, together with most of the associated garden features. In 1813 Humphry Repton (1752-1818) produced a Red Book of suggestions for the gardens and pleasure grounds immediately around the house, his designs being laid out piecemeal over the following decades.

The second Earl Brownlow inherited the estate in 1851, aged eleven, the estate, including the garden, being administered and improved by his mother, Lady Marian Alford. The estate was sold up in the 1920s, the house and garden becoming a training centre for Conservative Party workers, the park and woodland being largely acquired by the National Trust and peripheral plots being sold for housing. The house became the Ashridge Management College in 1959, in which use it and the gardens remain (1998).