Ardington House

A Baroque house in the Vale

The Clarke family were lords of the manor of Ardington for about two centuries. Edward Clarke commissioned the present house, built between 1719 and 1721, and wanted it perfectly symmetrical and full of light. Historic England attributes it, probably, to Thomas Strong the younger of Oxford, of the family of master masons who had worked with Wren at St Paul’s Cathedral and with Vanbrugh at Blenheim. It is built of grey brick with red brick dressings on a stone base, three storeys high and seven windows wide, arranged two, three, two.

The house’s best-known feature is the staircase in the Imperial Hall, which rises in two flights that join into a single flight. The house says it was modelled on Vanbrugh’s staircase at Kings Weston near Bristol. The last of the Clarkes at Ardington, William Nelson Clarke, wrote the history of the Wantage hundred published in 1824.

Later owners

After the Clarkes sold, the house was bought in 1833 by Robert Vernon, who had made a fortune supplying horses to the army in the Napoleonic Wars and formed a large collection of British paintings, which he gave to the nation; it is now divided between Tate and the National Gallery. He added his crest to the pediment. In 1861 the Ardington estate was bought by Robert Loyd-Lindsay, later Lord Wantage, and joined to the Lockinge estate; the house tells visitors that two Russian cannonballs from Inkerman, where he won his VC, stand by the front door. In the 1920s it was the home of Lord Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice. Since 1939 it has been the home of the Baring family, of the banking house founded in 1762.

Visiting

Ardington House remains a private family home and is also hired out for weddings, events and filming. The owners open it to visitors on certain days in the spring and summer; dates and prices are published on the house’s own website, and Historic Houses members are admitted free on open days. The house stands in its own park by the Ardington Brook at the east end of the village. Please do not enter the grounds outside advertised openings.

Nearby

Holy Trinity church, restored in 1887 largely at Lord Wantage’s expense and full of Clarke monuments, is next door. The estate village of Ardington, with its shop, mill and pub, and the model village of East Lockinge are part of the Lockinge estate.