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Holwood House


Holwood House is a 25,060 square feet (2,328 m2) country house in Keston, near Hayes, in the London Borough of Bromley, England. The house was designed by Decimus Burton, built between 1823 and 1826 and is in the Greek Revival style. It was built for John Ward who later employed Burton to lay out his Calverley Park Estate in Tunbridge Wells. The gate lodges of that estate take their names from the gate lodges on the Holwood Estate - Farnborough Lodge and Keston Lodge.

Holwood is a Grade I listed building, while its grounds, the Holwood Estate, are on the Historic England Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England.

Holwood House is on the site of an earlier building owned by William Pitt the Younger, and the grounds contain the remains of an Iron Age fort known as a "Caesar's Camp", which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Pitt is thought to have caused the Fort remains to be levelled in order to landscape the estate's gardens.

The house was described in Thomas Wilson in his Accurate Description of Bromley in Kent of 1797 as " a small, neat, white building; it is more simple than elegant, and built on a rising ground, which commands one of the most fertile, variegated, and extensive inland prospects in the whole county". Wilson added " A stranger visiting this house, to view the country mansion of the prime minister of Great Britain, would be exceedingly surprised, to find it so insignificant in size and external appearance". Pitt engaged John Soane to enlarge the house and Humphrey Repton to improve the grounds.


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