The Great House at Sonning is a hotel and restaurant with a riverside garden on the River Thames near Sonning Bridge at Sonning, Berkshire, England. It is possible for patrons to moor along the towpath running past the hotel on the river.
It was formerly a public house, known as the White Hart because King Richard II's wife, Isabella of Valois was kept prisoner at the Bishop's Palace in the village after his death. In 1989, the original White Hart was combined with The Red House, previously a private home on Lee's Hill where the dramatist Sir Terence Rattigan resided during 1945–47, to become The Great House.
On the opposite side of the road are Deanery Garden and St Andrew's Church. Close by, just over Sonning Bridge, is The Mill at Sonning, now a dinner theatre. On the opposite Oxfordshire bank of the Thames is another riverside hotel and restaurant, The French Horn.
Famous quotes containing the word house:
“My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)