It adds that the “buildings are not listed, locally listed or located within a conservation area. The house is located near to a scheduled ancient monument, the site of the demolished medieval manor house, where a portion of the moat remains. This area, including the moat and specified three to six-metre protection boundaries will not be affected by the works and will not form part of the demolition site.

“The house was previously rented but has been unoccupied for about seven or eight years. The property has been boarded up and has been subject to both vandalism and the theft of lead.”

Associated outbuildings that may also be demolished if permission is granted.

The report also adds that it is not considered financially viable to refurbish the buildings to a habitable standard. It contains a detailed list as to why this is considered not to be viable.

The site has claim to be of great historic importance. In medieval times this area to the west of Guildford was a royal deer park, created in 1154 by Henry II. It covered about 1,600 acres and included what today is Onslow Village, Westborough, Park Barn, parts of Woodbridge Hill, Guildford Park and The Mount. It was one of 13 such parks within Windsor Great Forest.

The deer park would have been surrounded by a ditch and a large bank with wooded posts on top. There would have been gaps in the bank where dear could jump in, but were unable to get out – known as deer leaps.

The site adjacent to the buildings proposed for demolition is a scheduled monument, where there was once a manor house, that was visited by several generations of royalty when they came to hunt, and is now a now a scheduled monument, following archaeological excavations in the 1970s. The remains of a moat that surrounded the manor house exist.

Within the documents submitted by the University of Surrey to Guildford Borough Council in its application is a heritage report on the farmhouse published in November 2017 by planning design firm Terence O’Rorke.

Further outbuildings that are subject to the planning application.

Among the details it states are that the buildings are “adjacent to, and within the setting of, the nationally important moated site of the former manor at Guildford Park, a scheduled monument. But the farm buildings themselves are not designated as heritage assets”.

It adds that the “core of the present Manor Farmhouse is a small two-bay timber-framed structure that was constructed soon after the manor house was dismantled and reused some of the timbers and masonry.

“The farmhouse was built in several phases; the 17th-century building, additions by the early 19th century, a major phase of remodelling between 1841 and 1871, and the minor addition of the north-east corner that was in existence by 1917. Of the farm buildings, the stables were built between 1871 and 1895, and the workshop store had been built by 1916, as part of an amended layout of the farmyard buildings to the south.

Therefore, a number of farms once occupied the ‘footprint’ of the deer park. These included Park Barn Farm, Deerbarn Farm, Wilderness Farm, and so on. Today, the ‘footprints’ of these farms are roughly the housing areas of Park Barn and Westborough, Woodbridge Hill and Onslow Village, respectively, as well as the campuses of the University of Surrey and the Surrey Research Park.

The farmhouse at Wilderness Farm in Onslow Village still exists, so therefore the only other farm buildings to survive from the period of the farms are those at Manor Farm, which the University of Surrey is aiming to demolish.

Details of the demolition application can be viewed on Guildford Borough Council’s website by clicking here.

See our previous story about the historic medieval royal deer park in Guildford and how the area developed over the centuries in relation to it.

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