Exbury House is an English country house in

Exbury and Lepe Exbury and Lepe is a civil parish in the New Forest in Hampshire, England. It is bounded to the west by the Beaulieu River, to the south by the shore of the Solent and to the east by the Dark Water. To the north it extends to the New Forest heat ...

, Hampshire, situated on the edge of the New Forest. It is a

Grade II* listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Ire ...

with associated

Grade II* listed In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern I ...

parkland and gardens. The house consists of an 18th-century core which was redesigned and refaced in 1927. Constructed of brick and ashlar with a slate roof, it has a rectangular floor plan (with one corner sliced off), 3 storeys and a parapet around the roof. The long side garden frontage has 9 bays and a

colonnade In classical architecture, a colonnade is a long sequence of columns joined by their entablature, often free-standing, or part of a building. Paired or multiple pairs of columns are normally employed in a colonnade which can be straight or curv ...

d entrance. The main entrance front on the sliced off corner has 5-bays. The gardens (see

Exbury Gardens Exbury Gardens is a informal woodland garden in Hampshire, England with large collections of rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias, and is often considered the finest garden of its type in the United Kingdom. Exbury holds the national collecti ...

) were laid out by Lionel de Rothschild between 1919 and 1939 and contain specialist collections of rhododendrons and other species.

History

Exbury Manor dates from the 13th century. It belonged to the Berkeley family in the 15th century and the Compton family of

Compton Wynyates Compton Wynyates is a Tudor country house in Warwickshire, England, a Grade I listed building. The Tudor period house is constructed of red brick and built around a central courtyard. It is castellated and turreted in parts. Following actio ...

in Warwickshire in the 16th. In 1708 it passed to William Mitford and thence down to his grandson, the historian

William Mitford William Mitford (10 February 1744 – 10 February 1827) was an English Member of Parliament and historian, best known for his ''The History of Greece'' (1784–1810). Youth William Mitford was born in Exbury, Hampshire, on 10 February 1744, i ...

(1744–1827). On the latter's death it passed directly to his grandson Henry Reveley Mitford, whose father had been drowned at sea in 1803 after his ship hit Bell Rock. Henry sold it to Major John Forster in the early 1880s, whose son sold it in turn to the financier

Lionel de Rothschild Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (22 November 1808 – 3 June 1879) was a British Jewish banker, politician and philanthropist who was a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family of England. He became the first practising Jew to sit ...

in 1919. Rothschild remodelled and upgraded the house, developed the gardens and extended the village of Exbury. He died in 1942 and the house was requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a headquarters to prepare for

Operation Neptune Operation or Operations may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * ''Operation'' (game), a battery-operated board game that challenges dexterity * Operation (music), a term used in musical set theory * ''Operations'' (magazine), Multi-Ma ...

. The house was designated as HMS ''Mastodon'' from May 1942 to July 1945, HMS ''King Alfred'' January to June 1946, then HMS ''Hawke'' from August 1946 to 1955. The house was finally returned to the Rothschild family in 1955 and Rothschild's son Edmund was able to renew the plant breeding program. The house itself was not reoccupied as a private residence until 1989. The gardens have been open to the public since 1950, run since 1988 by Exbury Gardens Ltd on a long lease from the Rothschild family. Janet Prentice, the heroine of Nevil Shute's novel ''

Requiem for a Wren ''Requiem For A Wren'' is a novel by Nevil Shute. It was first published in 1955 by William Heinemann Ltd. It was published in the United States under the title ''The Breaking Wave''. Plot summary The late 1940s story concerns two English wome ...

'', finds herself, as a

Wren Wrens are a family of brown passerine birds in the predominantly New World family Troglodytidae. The family includes 88 species divided into 19 genera. Only the Eurasian wren occurs in the Old World, where, in Anglophone regions, it is commonl ...

specialist in

landing craft Landing craft are small and medium seagoing watercraft, such as boats and barges, used to convey a landing force ( infantry and vehicles) from the sea to the shore during an amphibious assault. The term excludes landing ships, which are large ...

guns, assigned to HMS ''Mastodon'' in 1943. In the novel, Shute identifies ''Mastodon'' as Exbury, and describes the wonder of Prentice and a fellow Wren when they first arrive at the grand river-front house and explore its gardens. Among other things, they find underground irrigation systems, carefully labelled plants, and "... a rock garden half as large as Trafalgar Square that was a mass of bloom ..." All of this, says Shute, was tended by a gardening staff that "... had been reduced from fifty to a mere eighteen old men."

References

{{reflist Grade II* listed buildings in Hampshire Country houses in Hampshire