Parham Park
| Site of Special Scientific Interest | |
 Location within West Sussex
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| Area of Search | West Sussex |
|---|---|
| Grid reference | TQ059148 |
| Coordinates | 50°55′22″N 0°29′33″W / 50.922817°N 0.492407°WCoordinates: 50°55′22″N 0°29′33″W / 50.922817°N 0.492407°W |
| Interest | Biological |
| Area | 263.4 ha (651 acres) |
| Notification | 1965 |
| Natural England website | |
Parham Park is an Elizabethan house and estate in the civil parish of Parham, west of the village of Cootham, and between Storrington and Pulborough, West Sussex, South East England. The estate was originally owned by the Monastery of Westminster and granted to Robert Palmer by King Henry VIII in 1540.
The foundation stone was laid in 1577 by the 2-year-old Thomas Palmer, and Parham has been a family home ever since. Thomas Bishopp (later Sir Thomas Bishopp, 1st Baronet) bought Parham House in 1597. For 325 years his descendants continued to live at Parham House Estate until January 1922. Then in 1922 the Hon. Clive Pearson, younger son of Viscount Cowdray, bought Parham from Mary,17th Baroness Zouche in her own right, and he and his wife Alicia opened the house to visitors in 1948, after the Second World War when it had also been home to evacuee children and Canadian soldiers. Off the Long Gallery
at the top of the house there is an exhibition which touches on the period between 1922 and 1948, with many family photographs as well as photographs of the building works which took place during that time.
Mr and Mrs Pearson, followed by their daughter Veronica Mary Tritton, spent more than 60 years carefully restoring Parham and filling it with a sensitively chosen collection of beautiful old furniture, paintings and textiles, also acquiring items originally in the house. There is a particularly important collection of early needlework. What they created at Parham is a rare survival of mid 20th Century connoisseurship within a major Elizabethan house.
Now owned by a charitable trust, Parham House and Gardens are surrounded by some 875 acres (3.54 km2) of working agricultural and forestry land.
The great Radical Reformer, Henry 'Orator' Hunt was buried on Saturday, 21 February 1835 in the churchyard of St Peter's Church in Parham Park. The Times published a lengthy report of the funeral.
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Wikipedia