Stocks House

Mansion in Aldbury, Hertfordshire, England
the building in Hertfordshire, England, UK

Stocks Manor House is a large Georgian mansion, built in 1773. It is the largest property in the village of Aldbury, Hertfordshire. Stocks House and its manorial farm is an estate surrounded by of National Trust Ashridge Forest and the Chiltern Hills. It takes its name from the old famous stocks of the medieval village of Aldbury just down the road.

Stocks House was built in 1773 on the site of an earlier manor house known as La Stok which had existed since medieval times. Records from the 17th century show that the land was in the possession of Robert Duncombe, an ancestor of the Lords Feversham. In 1773, Arnold Duncombe built himself a new house. The estate then passed successively to the Hayton, Whitbread and Gordon families. The house has had a number of literary associations. James Adam Gordon, who inherited the Stocks estate in 1832, was a friend of the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, and it is reputed that the writer visited Gordon at Stocks House. to best selling British novelist Mary Augusta Ward and her husband Thomas Humphry Ward Mary was the better known writer of the two, and published two best selling novels Lady Rose's Daughter (1903) and The Marriage of William Ashe (1905), under the pen name Mrs Humphry Ward. who sold Stocks to the Blezard family, who later sold it to the bachelor Arthur Brown of the Luton quaker family of timber millers. The school was then dubbed Brondesbury at Stocks. Katharina Forbes Dunlop, a British author, became the last headmistress of the school, some years later. In 1972 Forbes Dunlop retired: she died at the age of 100. The parties were attended by a number of celebrities of the day including Peter Cook, John Cleese, Christopher Reeve, Jack Nicholson, Keith Moon and Tony Curtis, as well as Hugh Hefner, Kenny Lynch, Dai Llewellyn, Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, Bryan Ferry and Ringo Starr. The ITN newsreader Reginald Bosanquet reportedly appeared at the events strutting around in a fez and calf length boots. The parties attracted some comment from local residents; one local, complaining about a Hogmanay party held at Stocks, remarked: "At 3am on the first, the swimming pool was alive to the cries of naked ladies. And they were not singing Auld Lang Syne." Lownes also owned the house at 1 Connaught Square in London, which coincidentally was once the townhouse of Mary Augusta Ward, the former owner of Stocks, who died there. and then by Bridgend Group which converted it into a hotel and spa in the 1990s.

In 2004, Stocks was sold to Peter Harris, a retired horse trainer, entrepreneur and multimillionaire, for an undisclosed sum. A planning application to Dacorum to restore the historic Stocks Hotel back to a private home was made. The extensive renovation work was undertaken by Holloway White Allom and completed in early 2008. The architect for the project was Hugh Petter, Director at ADAM Architecture. It is now a family home once again occupied by Harris's daughter Alison (former wife of deceased jockey Walter Swinburn) and her children. Some shots in the music video for the 1982 song "Our House" by Madness were filmed at Stocks House. In 1997 the house and swimming pool also featured on the cover of the Oasis album, Be Here Now. For the photo shoot, a white 1972 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow was lowered into the swimming pool.