Dream of living like a Jane Austen heroine? Edgcote House might just be for you.
It may not be a truth universally acknowledged (to misquote the opening line of Pride and Prejudice), but property underpins everything in Jane Austen’s novels. The getting and losing of houses, and the fortunes associated with them, is everything in a world where a heroine’s fate depends on making a good marriage. No surprise, then, that TV and film productions fall over themselves to score the grandest period properties for their screen adaptations. One such is the Edgcote Estate in Banbury, Northamptonshire, which will never outlive its turn as Netherfield Park, Charles Bingley’s implausibly grand rented retreat, in the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice. Yes, that’s the one with a wet-shirted Colin Firth emerging from a lake, in one of the most replayed costume-drama moments of all time.
Even more thrillingly, Edgcote House was recently up for sale on the open market for the first time in a century. Bidders needed even deeper pockets than Mr Bingley to buy it: offers only in excess of £45 million were invited. While Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and her husband reportedly missed out on a bid for the sprawling estate, it's apparently been sold for £52 million to a top businesswoman.
For that, they get not only the superbly symmetrical Grade I-listed manor – a masterpiece of Georgian architecture designed by William Jones between 1748 and 1754 – but also a 1,700-acre park with woodland and farmland, the remains of a Roman villa, formal gardens landscaped by Capability Brown, a private racecourse, and a residential portfolio of 31 houses, cottages and flats. The lake isn’t the one immortalised by Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy – that scene was filmed at Lyme Park in Cheshire – but it’s no less picturesque for that.
The house itself is, of course, as heartbreakingly handsome as any Austen hero. Described by estate agents Savills as ‘an exceptional example of a traditional English country estate’ and arranged over four floors, it is noted for the quality of its stone façade, which is said to remain remarkably untainted by age. Inside, the open-well mahogany ‘great stair hall’ is surrounded by neoclassical details, while salons decorated in delicate historical hues are adorned with filigree plasterwork and hand-painted wallpapers.
In celebrating the estate’s celluloid fame, however, it would be remiss to overlook its unique place in English history. Its origins go back to William the Conqueror, who gave it to his loyal advisor Geoffrey de Montbray after the Norman Conquest. In 1469, it was the site of the Battle of Edgcote, a notable event in the Wars of the Roses, and in the 1530s, it passed to Henry VIII’s ill-fated statesman Thomas Cromwell. Shortly after Cromwell’s execution, the King bestowed it on his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, as part of her generous divorce settlement. By the 1920s, when brewing scion Raymond Courage established an equestrian centre here, the house Anne would have known was long gone, but its ghost adds another dash of romance to this ancient place, which now awaits its next hero or heroine.
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