Braziers Park

Braziers Park is a country house and Grade II* listed building at Ipsden, Oxfordshire, England. The house is owned and operated by a charitable trust as a residential adult education college, and centre for the School of Integrative Social Research.

Braziers Park was built in the late 17th century (with a datestone of 1688), and modelled in the Strawberry Hill Gothic style of architecture by Daniel Harris on behalf of Isaac George Manley (1755–1837) in 1799. As a teenager, Manley had been a naval officer with Captain Cook on the first voyage of the Endeavour 1768–71; and was later Vice Admiral of the Red, and as commander of HMS Apollo captured the French corvette Legere in 1796. He was made a Rear Admiral in 1809.

In 1839, Frances Eliza (Fanny) Grenfell (1814–91), later a biographer, was living at Braziers Park with her sisters, and was visited by novelist Charles Kingsley (1819–75), then a Cambridge undergraduate. Kingsley later fictionalized this meeting as that of Argemone with Lancelot Smith in his first novel Yeast (1848). Despite Fanny having taken a vow of chastity with her sisters at Braziers Park, she and Kingsley married in Bath in 1844.

Valentine Fleming, MP for South Oxfordshire, made substantial changes to the house when he bought it in 1906. His son Ian Fleming, the novelist, briefly lived at the house when very young.

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