Rothschild properties in Buckinghamshire
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Of all the landowners in the Buckinghamshire area, none have had more impact on the landscape than the de Rothschild family.
When Nathan Mayer Rothschild first arrived in London in the early Nineteenth Century his first priority was to establish business and to build influences. By the time of his death in 1836 he passed a fast growing banking business on to his eldest son Lionel Rothschild (1808-1879).
Gunnersbury Park in Middlesex was the first Rothschild country house to be purchased (in 1835), marking the start of a move north and westwards to Hertfordshire and the Vale of Aylesbury. The Rothschilds began to acquire large estates in Buckinghamshire in the 1840s, when an estate was purchased near Mentmore for hunting, with a stud farm and kennels being established.
Lionel Rothschild's brother Baron Mayer de Rothschild became the first Rothschild to build a house in Buckinghamshire when he commissioned Joseph Paxton to design Mentmore Towers in 1850.
Buckinghamshire had recently been blighted by a livestock famine that had almost destroyed the rural communities and so picturesque estates that were in close proximity to London were going cheap, and the agricultural depression saw many landed estates come onto the market. By 1900, different branches and generations of the family owned thousands of acres, forming the Vale of Aylesbury almost into a Rothschild enclave.
The properties that were purchased in Buckinghamshire include:
- Ascott House, Wing
- Aston Clinton House, Aston Clinton
- Eythrope, Waddesdon
- Halton House, Halton
- Mentmore Towers, Mentmore
- Waddesdon Manor, Waddesdon
Nathan Mayer Rothschild had rented Tring Park in Tring, Hertfordshire in the 1830s and in May 1872 it was purchased by Lionel Rothschild with 4,000 acres (16 km²) as his principal country residence.
Other Rothschild properties in Hertfordshire included Bentley Priory and Champneys (near Wiggington), and the family still owns an estate at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire.
Further afield, the Rothschild family owns the Exbury estate in Hampshire, world famous for the Rothschild collection of rhododendrons, azaleas & camellias.