An 18th-century house
In the 18th century the manor of Lockinge belonged to Matthew Wymondsold, who built a new house there in about 1750. It faced north and stood in a park beside the small medieval church of All Saints. Wymondsold died in 1757 and his sons Francis, William and Charles held the estate in turn. Through later marriages and inheritance it came to the Loyd family, and in 1858 it passed to Harriet Loyd and her husband Robert Loyd-Lindsay on their marriage. He was made Lord Wantage in 1885.
The Wantages’ house
The Loyd-Lindsays turned Lockinge into the centre of a great agricultural estate, which at its height covered more than 20,000 acres. From 1860 they cleared part of the old village that clustered around the church and manor house along the Lockinge Brook, which gave the house more privacy, and built a new estate village at East Lockinge. The house itself grew into a large building of brick and stone, with a centre block and two side wings of three storeys wrapped around the Wymondsold house.
The Victoria County History, written while Lady Wantage was still living there, describes the inside. The rooms were panelled, with a mid-18th-century staircase. In the hall stood an oak screen of the late 17th century with a central door and a gallery of turned balusters, brought from the hall of one of the City of London livery companies, alongside Italian panelling and carved woodwork. The walls held the couple’s large collection of paintings, including a Murillo.
Pulling it down
After Lady Wantage died in 1920 the estate passed to her Loyd relatives. Christopher Loyd was born in Lockinge House in 1923 and inherited the estate after the Second World War, following the deaths of his elder brother in 1943 and his father in 1944. By then the house needed around fifty servants to run. Faced with that cost and with the post-war pressures on landed estates, he decided that keeping the land and the villages going mattered more than the building. Demolition began in 1947 and the family moved to Betterton. The estate’s own history presents the decision as the one that allowed the rest of the estate to survive.
What is left
Almost nothing of the house remains above ground. All Saints church still stands in the wooded park, and an orangery at Lockinge Stables, one of the few survivors from the grounds, is listed Grade II. Much of the Wantages’ picture collection stayed with the family. The estate villages they built at East Lockinge and Ardington are the best monument to the house and the people who lived there.