Juniper Hall
| Juniper Hall | |
| Surrey | |
|---|---|
 Juniper Hall Field Centre | |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | TQ172527 |
| Location: | 51°15’41"N, 0°19’15"W |
| History | |
| Country house | |
| Information | |
| Condition: | Converted to field studies centre |
Juniper Hall is an 18th-century country house on the east slopes of Mickleham in the deep Mole Gap through the North Downs in Surrey. Today, leased from the National Trust, it operates as the Juniper Hall Field Centre.
The house stands 600 yards from the foot of Box Hill in the North Downs. Juniper Hall was opened as a field centre in 1947; one of the original four opened by the Field Studies Council.
Use
The building is used for science and geographical studies. The varying contours of the slopes of the North Downs here provide habitats and environments for study including unimproved chalk grassland, coppiced woodlands, heathland and the fresh water rivers, streams and springs. This was one of the original four centres opened and among around ten main premises used today.
History
The house was originally a public house, The Royal Oak, and was within the Manor of Fridley or Fredley bought in 1762 by Cecil Bishopp, briefly 7th Baronet and occupied by him. He made extensive plantations of trees on slopes beside where "he had purposed to erect a mansion; but relinquishing that design, he enlarged and fitted up an ale-house on the road-side ... the Royal Oak, belonging to the estate, for his own residence; and this dwelling obtained the designation of Juniper-hall, from the abundance of Juniper trees growing in the neighbourhood".[1]
The estate was 35 miles from the Bishopp family's Parham Park and his son inherited a family title of Lord Zouche.
David Jenkinson a wealthy "lottery owner" bought the house and let it from 1780 to Benjamin Elliott when according to historian Brayley (1841) skeletons of two Anglo-Saxons "in full war apparel" were found while the house was being extended.[2]
The house was leased by Jenkinson to a group of French émigrés from 1792 to 1793 which included Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Louis, comte de Narbonne-Lara grandson of King Louis XV of France and General Alexandre D'Arblay. D'Arblay met the novelist and diarist Fanny Burney in the Templeton Room here. He later married her in the village church.
In 1800 the house was sold with mixed woodland and garden of about 50 acres to Thomas Broadwood, the son of John Broadwood and a member of the piano manufacturing family Broadwood and Sons.
The last private owners of the house were the MacAndrew family who had major building works carried out from 1882 to 1885, which resulted in the building having its present form. Much of the earlier layout is now hidden, but the main office (formerly the morning room) and the Templeton room are little altered.
During the Second World War, the house was occupied by the Canadian Army in the build-up to the Normandy landings, and in 1945 it was sold by Miss MacAndrew to the National Trust. The trust owns and manages neighbouring Box Hill (excluding the linear, mainly early Victorian village).
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Juniper Hall) |
References
- ↑ A topographical history of Surrey, by Edward Wedlake Brayley and others 1841 page 453
- ↑ 'Parishes: Mickleham': A History of the County of Surrey - Volume 3 : {{{2}}} (Victoria County History)