Leith Hill Place
| Leith Hill Place | |
|
National Trust | |
|---|---|
 Leith Hill Place | |
| Grid reference: | TQ135425 |
| Location: | 51°10’14"N, 0°22’40"W |
| Built 1600, 1760 | |
| Information | |
Leith Hill Place is an Elizabethan country house on the flanks of Leith Hill, the highest hill of Surrey, and which is now within the estates of the National Trust.
The house was originally a gabled house dating from about 1600, but it was completely refaced in a Palladian style about 1760 by Richard Hull.
The house was bought in 1847 by Josiah Wedgwood III and remained in the family until the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who had been brought up there and eventually inherited it, gave it to the National Trust in 1944. Subsequently it was leased from the Trust by his cousins Sir Ralph Wedgwood and then Sir John Wedgwood, later becoming a boarding house for a nearby sixth form college, Hurtwood House.
The house was opened to the public by the National Trust in 2013 and now serves as a memorial to Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Garden
Josiah Wedgwood's widow, born Caroline Darwin, created a rhododendron wood there, now open to the public.