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Taplow Court

Country houses in BuckinghamshireEngineering research institutesGrenfell familyHistory of telecommunications in the United KingdomPlessey
Research institutes in BuckinghamshireSoka GakkaiTourist attractions in BuckinghamshireUse British English from September 2013
Taplow court front
Taplow court front

Taplow Court is a Victorian house in the village of Taplow in Buckinghamshire, England. Its origins are an Elizabethan manor house, remodelled in the early 17th century. In the 18th century the court was owned by the Earls of Orkney. In the 1850s, the court was sold to Charles Pascoe Grenfell, whose descendants retained ownership until after the Second World War. The court then served as a corporate headquarters for British Telecommunications Research (BTR) an independent research company set up in 1946. BTR was subsequently acquired by Plessey Electronics. In 1988 it was bought by the Buddhist foundation, Soka Gakkai International and serves as their UK headquarters. The court is a Grade II listed building, and its present appearance is due to a major rebuilding undertaken by William Burn for Charles Grenfell in 1855-1860. In the early 20th century, the court was home to William Grenfell and his wife Ettie. She was a noted Edwardian hostess, and Taplow Court became a gathering place for The Souls, a group of aristocratic intellectuals.

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

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 51.5316 ° E -0.6947 °
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Address

Taplow Court

Cliveden Road
SL6 0EP , Taplow (Beeches Community Board)
England, United Kingdom
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Taplow court front
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Nearby Places

Skindles
Skindles

Skindles was a hotel in Maidenhead, England, on the Buckinghamshire bank of the River Thames by Maidenhead Bridge. Formerly the Orkney Arms, built in 1743, it was turned from a coaching inn into a fashionable hotel by William Skindle in 1833. In the 20th century, it became notorious as a place for adulterous assignations. Its guests included Winston Churchill and Princess Margaret. Musicians who performed there included The Stranglers, The Rolling Stones, and The Strawbs. The hotel appears in the film Kind Hearts and Coronets. Skindles is mentioned in the play Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff: 'We danced a bit at Skindles, and drank a lot of port and muck'.A property developer bought the site in 2006 for just over £30m, but Irish Nationwide bank took it over in 2009 to try to recover a £40m loan. The property was then transferred to the Irish bank NAMA. Barratt Homes and the National Grid then secured an option for most of the site for a joint development project involving housing and a hotel. South Bucks council adopted a residential-led development brief in July 2013 but argued that it would prefer Skindles Hotel itself to be renovated; any demolition proposals would need to be "robustly justified".By summer 2013, the hotel's condition had begun to fall further into disrepair, with parts of the roof beginning to collapse under the repeated weathering caused by the recent hard winters that hit the UK. The building had been derelict from about the mid-1990s. The hotel's site was put up for sale by in November 2013, after Barratt's option expired. It was bought by the housebuilder Berkeley Group in February 2014.Demolition of Skindles and clearance of the surrounding area started around 18 October 2015 to make way for a housing development of nearly 300 homes, office space, a restaurant and walkways along the Thames. The restaurant on the old hotel site was purchased in 2018 and developed into a French brasserie called Roux at Skindles.