Nuneham Courtenay - Nuneham House and Park

Nuneham House and Park

The village, parish church and manor house used to stand on a river bluff with a westward view over the River Thames. The manor house may have dated from the 16th century. The 1st Earl demolished the house, church and "tumble-down clay-built" cottages of the village, built a new Nuneham House and parish church in slightly different positions (see below) and built an entirely new Nuneham Courtenay village almost 1 mile (1.6 km) to the northeast to make way for his plans for a landscaped park.

The new village comprises two identical rows of brick-built semi-detached cottages, each of a single main storey plus an attic floor with dormer windows. The two identical rows face each other across the Oxford–Dorchester main road, which had been made a turnpike in 1736. (It has been classified the A4074 since the 20th century.) As the village population has subsequently grown, additional cottages have been added in similar styles early in the 19th century and again early in the 20th century. The old village had a village green. The new village has none, but was built to a spacious plan with gardens for every cottage and verges between them and the main road.

In the 1760s the Irish writer, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of an ancient village and destruction of its farms to clear land to become a wealthy man's garden. His poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry.

The Deserted Village gave the demolished village the pseudonym "Sweet Auburn" and Goldsmith did not disclose the real village on which he based it. However, he did indicate it was about 50 miles (80 km) from London and it is widely believed to have been Nuneham Courtenay.

The new Nuneham House was designed by the architect Stiff Leadbetter in 1756. The design was changed and enlarged twice during construction, so that the house when completed in 1764 was far from the compact Palladian villa projected eight years earlier The design of the landscaped park owed much to the poet and gardener the Rev. William Mason, who designed its flower garden in 1771. The Poet Laureate William Whitehead was also a visitor, and it was he who coined the change of spelling from "Newenham" to "Nuneham" in about 1764. George Simon Harcourt, 2nd Earl Harcourt commissioned Lancelot "Capability" Brown to make alterations to the park in 1779 and the house in 1781. The works were completed in the autumn of 1782, shortly before Brown's death. Whitehead's poem The Late Improvements at Nuneham celebrated Brown's work.

Brown had planned a neo-Gothic tower for a prominent site overlooking the Thames. However in 1787 the University of Oxford dismantled Carfax Conduit, which had been built in 1617 in the centre of Oxford. The 2nd Earl re-erected the Conduit building in his park instead of the proposed tower.

Archbishop Harcourt commissioned the architect Robert Smirke to make unaesthetic but functional extensions to the house. Archbishop Harcourt destroyed Mason's flower garden and most of its sculptures, but he also bought and added adjacent land in Marsh Baldon parish to extend the park eastwards as far as the Oxford–Dorchester main road. On this new land he had the artist W.S. Gilpin build a Doric entrance lodge in about 1830 and plant a pinetum in 1835. Further alterations to the house were made in 1904.

In 1963 the pinetum became Harcourt Arboretum, part of the tree and plant collection of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden. It includes 10 acres (4 ha) of woodland and a 37-acre (15 ha) wild-flower meadow.