Nuneham House

Nuneham House is a Palladian villa, at Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire England. It was built for Simon Harcourt, 1st Earl Harcourt in 1756. It is owned by Oxford University and is currently used as a retreat centre by the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University. It is a Grade II* listed building.

Lord Harcourt demolished the old village in the 1760s in order to create a landscaped park around his new villa. He removed the village in its entirety, and recreated it along the main Oxford road (now the A4074). The house was built in 1757 by Stiff Leadbetter for the 1st Earl Harcourt, with the interior by James Stuart. Lancelot "Capability" Brown designed the landscaped grounds.

In the 1760s Oliver Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of an ancient village and destruction of its farms to clear land to become a wealthy man's garden. His poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry.The Deserted Village gave the demolished village the pseudonym "Sweet Auburn", and Goldsmith did not disclose the real village to which it refers. However, he did indicate it was about 50 miles (80 km) from London and it is widely believed to have been Nuneham Courtenay.

The house was altered by Henry Holland in 1781-2, including the heightening of the wings. In 1789 the 2nd Earl Harcourt re-erected the Carfax Conduit building in a prominent position in the park. It had had to be moved from Carfax in the centre of Oxford, where it was an obstacle to traffic.

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