Holding out for a hero

The battle for Trafalgar Park raged for a century and the Wiltshire estate now comes to the market after a victorious restoration

- Penny Churchill

WRITING in COUNTRY LIFE (April 3/10, 1997), the magazine’s former Architectural Editor the late Giles Worsley referred to stately Grade I-listed Trafalgar Park, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, as ‘the Flying Dutchman of the property world, endlessly seeking an owner and being sold on while the fabric slowly decayed’. The fine country house built by John James of Greenwich in 1733 for City grandee Sir Peter Vandeput was nevertheless described as ‘an estate agent’s dream, a house that always seemed to come back on the market’.

Sir Peter died in 1748 and, four years later, Standlynch Park and its surrounding estate were bought by William Young, later Governor of Dominica, and sold by him to Henry Dawkins MP, who added the north and south wings designed by John Wood the Younger of Bath. Dawkins also commissioned his friend and fellow member of the Society of Dilettanti, Nicholas Revett, a founding member of Britain’s Greek Revivalist movement, to design the portico, interiors for the north wing and a number of chimneypieces. He then commissioned fashionable Italian painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Cipriani to paint the scenes in his music room, now known as the Cipriani Room. Following Dawkins’s death in 1814, the Standlynch Park estate was bought by the Crown on behalf of the Nelson family as reward for the Admiral’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805. Horatio Nelson having died in the battle, Standlynch Park, renamed Trafalgar House, its estate and a substantial pension were settled on his brother, William, an unassuming Norfolk clergyman who was created 1st Earl Nelson. Enriched by marriage and inheritance, his successors expanded the landholdings to 7,196 acres by 1884.