Minley Manor
51°19′01″N 0°49′12″W / 51.317°N 0.820°W Minley Manor is a Grade 2* listed country manor house, located within a grade II registered garden, built in the French style by Henry Clutton in the 1860s with further additions in the 1880s. The Manor is situated 2 miles north of junction 4A of the M3 between Farnborough and Yateley in Hampshire, England and is situated in 80 acres (32 ha) of grounds.[1]
History
The current manor house was built in the French style by Henry Clutton between 1858 and 1860 for Raikes Currie, a partner in Glyn Mills' Bank.[2] During the next three years attention turned to the estate, with the creation of formal gardens around the house and a kitchen garden. The remainder was landscaped as pleasure gardens by F W Meyer,[3] working with the horticulturists Veitch & Sons of Exeter. On Raikes' death in 1881, his son Bertram Wodehouse Currie continued the development, employing Messrs Veitch to lay out a Winter Garden and extensions to the pleasure gardens, which included Hawley Lake, in the 1880s. The house was the birthplace of the British diplomat Sir Reginald Hoare in 1882.[4] Raikes' grandson Laurence Currie built a water tower, created a new complex of walled gardens and further extended the ornamental planting and woodland.[2]
The property passed to the War Office in 1934,[2] initially for the Senior Wing of the nearby Staff College, Camberley.[5] It was used by the Royal Engineers, from 1971, as a brigade headquarters and then, from 1990, as an officers' mess for units at Gibraltar Barracks, which are located on the opposite side of the A327 Minley Road.[2] One of the main features is a 600-metre Wellingtonia tree avenue, which was shown off to good effect in the 1969 movie Mosquito Squadron, where the manor house played the part of a French château used as a prisoner of war camp and factory for the V-1 flying bomb. The manor was also used as a location in the 2007 Victorian fantasy movie Stardust, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer.[6]
In 2013, as part of the RSME-PPP project, the Holdfast consortium built a new officers' mess on the Gibraltar Barracks site. The Ministry of Defence part-funded this project from sale of the manor[7] which was sold to an international investor in November 2014.[8]
References
- ^ "Minley Manor". Ad locations. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
- ^ a b c d "Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest". English Heritage. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
- ^ "F W Meyer". Parks and Gardens. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
- ^ "Reginald Hoare". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
- ^ "Number of Land Forces Army Estimates, 1949–50". Hansard. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
- ^ "Lights Camera Action! MOD provides movie backdrops". Defence News. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
- ^ "Heritage Report 2009" (PDF). Ministry of Defence. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
- ^ "Historic Minley Manor sold to international investor". Insider Media. 18 November 2014. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
