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Milton Court

Country houses in SurreyGrade II* listed buildings in SurreyGrade II* listed housesWilliam Burges buildings
Milton Court geograph.org.uk 1568767
Milton Court geograph.org.uk 1568767

Milton Court, at the far west of the town of Dorking, is a 17th-century country house in Surrey. The court was expanded and substantially rebuilt by the Victorian architect William Burges and is a Grade II* listed building including the attached forecourt walls, balustrading, terrace, piers, urns and stone-carved ball finial.Originally a priory, the estate was granted to George Evelyn, father of the diarist John Evelyn at the Protestant Reformation. George Evelyn was lord of the adjoining manor of Wotton, Surrey where the family had established themselves at Wotton House. In the nineteenth century, the court was bought by Lachlan Mackintosh Rate, a wealthy lawyer, banker and philanthropist. He employed William Burges to undertake substantial rebuilding. Working in an ornate Jacobean style, Burges added twenty rooms, with elaborate fireplaces and ceilings. Perhaps the most successful is the famed Flower room, formerly Mrs Rate's boudoir. Nikolaus Pevsner describes it as "a picturesque seven-bay house with shaped gables".The house is now the UK headquarters of the health insurance company Unum, which has worked to restore the house and its interior decoration.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Milton Court (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Milton Court
Milton Court Lane (BW 110), Mole Valley

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Latitude Longitude
N 51.2317 ° E -0.3522 °
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Milton Court

Milton Court Lane (BW 110)
RH4 3LY Mole Valley
England, United Kingdom
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Milton Court geograph.org.uk 1568767
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Dorking
Dorking

Dorking () is a market town in Surrey in South East England, about 34 km (21 mi) south of London. It is in Mole Valley District and the council headquarters are to the east of the centre. The High Street runs roughly east–west, parallel to the Pipp Brook and along the northern face of an outcrop of Lower Greensand. The town is surrounded on three sides by the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and is close to Box Hill and Leith Hill. The earliest archaeological evidence of human activity is from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, and there are several Bronze Age bowl barrows in the local area. The town may have been the site of a staging post on Stane Street during Roman times, however the name 'Dorking' suggests an Anglo-Saxon origin for the modern settlement. A market is thought to have been held at least weekly since early medieval times and was highly regarded for the poultry traded there. The Dorking breed of domestic chicken is named after the town. The local economy thrived during Tudor times, but declined in the 17th century due to poor infrastructure and competition from neighbouring towns. During the early modern period many inhabitants were nonconformists, including the author, Daniel Defoe, who lived in Dorking as a child. Six of the Mayflower Pilgrims, including William Mullins and his daughter Priscilla, lived in the town before setting sail for the New World. Dorking started to expand during the 18th and 19th centuries as transport links improved and farmland to the south of the centre was released for housebuilding. The new turnpike, and later the railways, facilitated the sale of lime produced in the town, but also attracted wealthier residents, who had had no previous connection to the area. Residential expansion continued in the first half of the 20th century, as the Deepdene and Denbies estates began to be broken up. Further development is now constrained by the Metropolitan Green Belt, which encircles the town.

Denbies
Denbies

Denbies is a large estate to the northwest of Dorking in Surrey, England. A farmhouse and surrounding land originally owned by John Denby was purchased in 1734 by Jonathan Tyers, the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens in London, and converted into a weekend retreat. The house he built appears to have been of little architectural significance, but the Gothic garden he developed in the grounds on the theme of death achieved some notoriety, despite being short-lived. The estate was bought by Lord King of Ockham following Tyers's death in 1767, and the macabre artefacts he had installed, including two stone coffins topped by human skulls, were removed. Joseph Denison, a wealthy banker, purchased the estate in about 1787, and it remained in the Denison family until 1849, when it passed to Thomas Cubitt, a master builder. At the time, Cubitt was working on Osborne House for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and the mansion he designed to replace the old one was a more modest version of Osborne. It was, however, still a substantial building, in the Italianate style, with almost 100 rooms on three storeys. In the nineteenth century Denison and later Cubitt served as local Members of Parliament, for West Surrey. The payment of death duties and the difficulty of maintaining a large domestic estate during the Second World War forced the family to begin selling parcels of land. Cubitt's mansion was abandoned until its demolition in 1953, by which time the family was living in a Regency-style house converted from the housing of the garden and stable staff in more affluent times. What remained of the estate – about 635 acres (2.57 km2) – was put on the market in 1984 and bought by Biwater, a water-treatment company. Two years later the company chairman Adrian White established Denbies Wine Estate, using 268 acres (1.08 km2) on a south-facing piece of land to plant vines.