Hughenden Manor

Hughenden Manor stands on a hill west of the A4128 road near Hughenden in Buckinghamshire. The house began as a modest 18th-century mansion before Benjamin Disraeli, later Earl of Beaconsfield, remodelled it in the 1860s. The architect Edward Buckton Lamb created an eclectic Gothic design with angular brickwork and stepped battlements. Nikolaus Pevsner criticised the changes, calling them “excruciating,” yet Disraeli praised the “romance” he had achieved. The three-storey building has reception rooms on the ground floor, each opening onto a south-facing terrace. Views stretch across the grassy parterre to the Hughenden Valley. The house became home to Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne after he bought it in 1847 with a £25,000 loan. Both are buried in the nearby churchyard of St Michael and All Angels, where Queen Victoria erected a memorial to Disraeli. During the Second World War the basement served as a secret intelligence base called Hillside, analysing aerial photographs for bombing missions. The National Trust now preserves the manor as it appeared in Disraeli’s time, filled with family portraits, his furnishings and a library of his novels. A monument on a nearby hill, raised by Mary Anne in 1862, overlooks the estate. The grounds cover almost 1,500 acres of parkland and woodland. The formal garden, restored to its Victorian state, features a long terrace adorned with Florentine vases. A parterre of lawns and flowerbeds leads the eye toward the valley below. The west wing, added in 1910, extends the house under later owners. Visitors walk through rooms that still hold Disraeli’s personal belongings and books inherited from his father. The church downhill contains the only memorial to a subject erected by a reigning British monarch.