Where Is This? No.266

Published on: 30 Jun, 2017
Updated on: 30 Jun, 2017

By David Rose

The house and buildings featured as last week’s mystery vintage picture can be found at the Nightingale Road entrance to Stoke Park.

Several readers correctly identified the location with references to the sports changing rooms there.

Mike Williams asked for more details about the farm that was once there; and in her reply to the post Chris Townsend wrote: “The model farm complex dated 1881 was built for James Smith Budgett of Stoke Park Mansion.”

I can add a short history of Stoke Park and the house that once stood there.

A family by the name of Turner is likely to have built the house by 1729, replacing an earlier building called Vine Tree.

The land was bought by a Jeremiah Dyson in 1761. He was the principal clerk to the House of Commons and then became an MP for Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, then Weymouth and later Horsham.

In 1781 Stoke park passed into the ownership of William Aldersey, who served in the East India Company in Madras. He was responsible for opening up Stoke Road and a good deal of rebuilding of Stoke Park Mansion.

Aldersey became Lord of the Manor of Stoke and Stoughton. His widow sold Stoke Park along with the lordship to Nathanial Hillier in 1801.

Hillier’s eldest daughter, Harriet, married Colonel James Bogle Delap and it became their home for 50 years.

They had no children, and Nathaniel Hillier arranged for the house to pass to Harriet’s sister Susannah, who had married Thomas Cranley Onslow, younger brother of the 3rd Earl of Onlsow.

The earl’s only son died an infant, so Thomas and Susannah’s son, William (born 1853), who became the 4th Earl of Onslow became heir of the Onslow estate and Stoke Park in 1870.

The house was very run down, and the earl sold it in 1879, along with the lordship of the manor, to a James Smith Budgett of Ealing Park for £24,000. He was a sugar broker and merchant.

As mentioned, he set up the model farm, a concept popular at the time when British agriculture was at the forefront of stock husbandry and these types of farms were created by land owners to show off their wealth.

A Herbert Maitland Budgett later took ownership and leased it to a C. E. Lewis of Shere who used it as a high class boarding school for boys.

Bugdett sold it to Guildford Corporation in 1925, with the school continuing for several years. The park became a public open space.

Stoke Park Mansion was pulled down in 1977. It had been used as a telephone command centre during the Second World War and then by the council.

The quirky picture last week showing a badge with the words ONSLOW, can be found on the front of Onslow Village Hall in Wilderness Road.

Click here for last week’s post and to read the replies.

Do you know where this is? Click on pictures to enlarge them.

This week’s mystery vintage image is a 1900s picture postcard view in a ribbon-like village not far from Guildford. There’s a church in the distance. Do you know where this is?

While the location of the features in this week’s quirky picture are not that far away from the above.

Have you seen this and know where it is?

A delightful planter can be seen with wooden bollards, whose design is a bit of a give-away of certain things associated with this village.

If you think you know the answers and can add some extra details, please leave a reply in the box below.

The answers, along with the next pair of images, will be published at about the same time next week.

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