Rothschild properties in Buckinghamshire

Of all the landowners in the Buckinghamshire area, none have had more impact on the landscape than the Rothschild family. The properties that were purchased or built in Buckinghamshire include:

* Ascott House, Wing
* Aston Clinton House, Aston Clinton
* Eythrope, Waddesdon
* Halton House, Halton
* King's Head Inn, Aylesbury
* Mentmore Towers, Mentmore
* Waddesdon Manor, Waddesdon

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 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.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild had rented Tring Park in Tring, Hertfordshire in the 1830s. It was purchased with 4,000 acres (16 km²) by Lionel Rothschild in May 1872 as his principal country residence. The family seat was established at Waddesdon Manor, near to the market town of Aylesbury, and the Rothschilds expanded their influence with the purchase of the historic King's Head as a hotel and public house. The King's Head was gifted to the National Trust in 1925, and later Waddesdon Manor and Ascott House followed into the Trust's care.

Other Rothschild properties in Hertfordshire included Bentley Priory and Champneys (near Wigginton), and the family still owns an estate at Ashton Wold near Oundle in Northamptonshire, the family home of Dr. Miriam Louisa Rothschild.

Further afield, the Rothschild family owns the Exbury estate in Hampshire, world famous for the Rothschild collection of rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias.

References

*cite book
last = Ferguson
first = Niall
year = 1998
title = The World's Banker. The History of the House of Rothschild
publisher = Weidenfeld and Nicolson
location = London
id = ISBN 0 297 815393

ee also

* George Devey