Mentmore Towers
Mentmore Towers is a large
Neo-Renaissance English country house in the village of
Mentmore in
Buckinghamshire. It takes its name from the village in which it stands, and from its numerous towers and
pinnacles. Historically it was always known as just Mentmore
[The simple name "Mentmore" has now been adopted by a large golf club built in the former park.], and by locals and estate staff as the Mansion, as is the case at nearby
Tring Park. However, the name Mentmore Towers has stuck and is the accepted one today. One of the house's former owners,
Lord Rosebery, once said: "Mentmore Towers sounded like a second-rate boarding house". It is a Grade 1
listed building.
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Mentmore photographed circa 1914. |
The house was built between
1852 and
1854 for
Baron Mayer de Rothschild, who needed a house close to
London and close to other Rothschild homes at
Tring in
Hertfordshire,
Ascott,
Aston Clinton and later
Waddesdon Manor and
Halton House. Since
1846 he had slowly been buying land in the area. However, it was not until
1850 that he bought the manor and
advowson of Mentmore for £12,400 from the trustees of the Harcourt family.
The plans for the new mansion, which was begun in 1852, imitated
Wollaton Hall in
Nottingham; they were drawn by the architect
Joseph Paxton, famous for
the Crystal Palace (see
plans and interiors of Mentmore).
The old manor house, with its later
Georgian facade, which had been built by the
Wigg family in the 16th century, became known as the 'Garden House', the home of the Rothschild's head gardener; later it became the Estate Office. Today (
2004) it is once again the village Manor House.
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The dining room. The boiseries were from the Hôtel de Villars, Paris, and are the first example of this type of decoration to be used in an English house. The fragments of the boiseries not used at Mentmore were later installed at Waddesdon Manor |
The Baron and his wife did not live long after the Towers' completion. After the Baroness's death it was inherited by her daughter
Hannah, later Countess of Rosebery. Following her demise in
1890 aged 39 from
Bright's Disease, it became the home of her widower
Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, later
Prime Minister for two years from
1894. In the late 1920s the fifth earl gave the estate to his son Harry, Lord Dalmeny, who in 1929 on the death of his father became the sixth Earl.
Both earls bred numerous winners of classic
horse races at the two stud farms on the estate, including five
Epsom Derby winners. These were
Ladas,
Sir Visto, and
Cicero from the
Crafton Stud on the estate; plus
Ocean Swell and
Blue Peter from the
Mentmore Stud itself.
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The staircase, and the plate-glass door leading to the grand hall. |
Following the death of the sixth earl in
1973, the Labour government of
James Callaghan refused to accept the contents in lieu of
inheritance taxes, which would have turned the house into one of England's finest
museums of
European furniture,
objets d'art and
Victorian era architecture. The government was offered the house and contents for £2,000,000 but declined, and after three years of fruitless discussion, the executors of the estate sold the contents by public auction for over £6,000,000. Among the paintings sold were works by
Gainsborough,
Reynolds,
Boucher,
Drouais,
Moroni and other well known artists, and cabinet makers, including
Jean Henri Riesener and
Chippendale. Also represented were the finest German and Russian silver- and goldsmiths, and makers of
Limoges enamel. This Rothschild/Mentmore collection is said to have been one of the finest ever to be assembled in private hands, other than the bathroom fittings collections of the
Russian and British royal families .
The empty house, unaltered since the day it was built, was sold in 1977 for £220,000 to
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the
Transcendental Meditation movement. Later, during the 1980s and 1990s, the movement made Mentmore the British national headquarters of its political arm, the
Natural Law Party.
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Mentmore 1975, during the sale by Sotheby's of the contents |
From 1977 to 1979 a handful of TM staff lived there, until in early 1979 Maharishi moved about a hundred young men, all TM teachers, to the property. Mentmore was set up as the UK seat of the
World Government for the Age of Enlightenment and used as the launching point to establish
City Parliaments in most of the UK's larger cities. For roughly three years (1979 through 1982) the Towers saw an immense level of activity with numerous banquets to woo the UK's rich and famous. A number of laboratories were built in the former servants' wing and used for TM research. These operated under the name
Maharishi European Research University or MERU. Several series of seminars were run, aimed at inspiring academics, principally from
Oxford and
Cambridge Universities, to do research on TM. Visiting speakers included Nobel Laureate
Brian Josephson, Professor
Ilya Prigogine,
Hans Eysenck, and many other leading international academics.
In 1982 Mentmore's role was changed to become the home of the
University of Natural Law. A few years later it was transformed again, to be the UK headquarters of the
Natural Law Party. In a search for sources of income, the TM organisation ran a number of businesses out of Mentmore (including making fudge, selling silk dresses, hosting classical music concerts and using the building as a film location). After 1982 the number of staff at Mentmore decreased to about thirty until the building was sold.
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The Gold Room, formerly the white drawing room with an especially designed modern carpet mirroring the ceiling plasterwork |
In
1997 Mentmore Towers was sold to a company, owned by Simon Halabi, now named
Mentmore Towers Ltd, that, while restoring it, plans to turn it into a luxury hotel with over 100 suites. However, in
September 2004 a local resident won a last-minute
injunction in the
High Court to halt work on the hotel while a
judicial review investigated if the
planning permission granted had followed the correct procedures. In
March 2005 the High Court ruled that
Aylesbury Vale District Council's decision to grant planning permission to the developers was "unimpeachable" and legally sound.
In the last few years the house has appeared in many films, most memorably
Eyes Wide Shut with
Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman. Other films that have used the location include
Terry Gilliam's
Brazil and
The Mummy. In
Batman Begins, Mentmore Towers was used as the gothic
Wayne Manor. The
Spice Girls recorded a 1999 music video on the grand marble staircase. It also served as the filming location of the music video to
Enya's "Only If...".
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Rothschild properties in Buckinghamshire
