John Scandrett Harford

John Scandrett Harford
Born	8 October 1785 Bristol
Died	16 April 1866 Blaise Castle, Bristol

John Scandrett Harford, FRS (8 October 1785 – 16 April 1866) was a British banker, benefactor and abolitionist.

John Scandrett Harford was born the son of John Scandrett Harford, a prominent banker in the English city of Bristol and educated at Christ College, Cambridge. By the end of the 18th Century he was a wealthy banker in his own right and known as being a landowner, a staunch Quaker and an abolitionist (and friend of William Wilberforce).

Harford had a sizeable portfolio, including the Blaise Castle Estate at Henbury. This was originally property of Thomas Farr, but Farr went bankrupt in 1778 following the American Revolutionary War. The estate then changed hands a number of times until Harford's father eventually purchased the land and buildings. John Harford the Elder had a plain but substantial house built and asked the landscape architect Humphry Repton to lay out the grounds. Repton became a partner of John Nash, whom Harford commissioned to design a group of cottages, Blaise Hamlet, as homes for his retired servants. Nash created sketches of the cottages, which George Repton built.Diamond Cottage is an example of the extremely picturesque style of the cottages. John Harford the Elder patronised Hannah More's schools in Somerset in the 1790s.

In 1819, he also acquired the Peterwell estate at Lampeter, making the purchase jointly with his younger brothers. It was previously owned by his father-in-law, Richard Hart Davis, who had built c.1812 a house within its bounds. The estate descended to his nephew John Battersby Harford, who remodelled the house in the Italianate style in 1859 as Falcondale.

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