Alderley Park

Alderley Park was a country house in a park of the same name at Nether Alderley, Cheshire, between Macclesfield and Knutsford. It was formerly an AstraZeneca facility but was recently purchased by family-owned property company, Bruntwood. The site has an international reputation as a world-class home for bio and life sciences and is also home to the BioHub Incubator. The site is also set to be home to commercial office space, retail units and residential properties.

The house was constructed in brick with a stone facade for the 7th Baronet Stanley. Building started in 1818 on a site in the south of the park. The new house grew to a size of sixty bedrooms and six entertaining rooms, of which only one room, with its oak panelling and coats of arms intact, remains. Behind the house a walled garden and a water garden were created and the mill pond enlarged. In 1931, however, the house was severely damaged by fire and left empty for nearly twenty years until converted in 1950 by the ICI chemical group to serve as the headquarters of their new pharmaceutical division. The gardens and some outbuildings have been preserved and many thousands of trees planted.

The manor of Over Alderley came into the Stanley family when heiress Elizabeth Weever married John Stanley, a brother of the Earl of Derby. In the 1580s John Stanley's descendant, Thomas Stanley, built a mansion house on a moated site near the mill at Nether Alderley. Thomas died in 1591.

The adjacent manor of Nether Alderley had been confiscated by the crown in 1508 from the estate of Sir William Stanley after his conviction and execution for supporting Perkin Warbeck. It was sold in 1556 to Sir Edward Fitton of Gawsworth who sold it on for £2000 to Thomas Stanley, jnr in 1602. Thomas was knighted by King James in 1603.

The Stanley family subsequently occupied the hall for around two hundred years until it was severely damaged by fire in 1779. The 7th Baronet then commissioned a new hall to be constructed in 1818 in the south of the estate on a site then occupied by Park House.

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