Saint Hill Manor

Saint Hill Manor stands near East Grinstead in West Sussex on a 59-acre estate of landscaped gardens. The house was built in 1792 by Gibbs Crawfurd, a Member of Parliament, to a design attributed to Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Earlier, Robert Adam and his brother John had drawn up a Gothic and neoclassical design for Crawfurd in 1785, but it was never used. The estate replaced an earlier house built in 1733 by Crawfurd’s father, who had bought the land in 1715. A surviving watercolour by James Lambert shows the first Saint Hill House. The house passed through several owners, including Edgar March Crookshank and Drexel Biddle, who commissioned the Monkey Mural painted by John Spencer-Churchill. In the late 19th century it served as the headquarters of the China Inland Mission, where Hudson Taylor and William Thomas Berger met often. During the Second World War it became a convalescent home for Royal Air Force officers recovering at East Grinstead’s Queen Victoria Hospital. The Maharaja of Jaipur, Sawai Man Singh, bought the estate in 1947 and renamed it Saint Hill Manor. L. Ron Hubbard purchased the manor in 1959 and lived there until 1966. He expanded the estate with new buildings, including a mock-gothic castle built after 1968 to train Scientology followers. The Church of Scientology later renovated the property at a reported cost of US$16 million and now runs it as a museum featuring exhibits on Hubbard’s work. The grounds overlook the hills of the High Weald, and nearby archaeological finds suggest a small priory or early 17th-century dwelling once stood on the site.