FROM humble farmhouse to Victorian edifice, to elegant, Regency-style country house, the evolution of The Denbies House at Ranmore Common, near Dorking, reflects the changing fortunes of the rich and famous in Surrey, from the mid 18th century to the present day.
Named after John Denby, who farmed the land in the 16th century, the original farmhouse and its surrounding Surrey Hills estate were bought in the mid 1700s as a weekend retreat by Jonathan Tyers, the owner of London’s fashionable Vauxhall Gardens. Having converted some of the former farm buildings into a modest, two-storey house, Tyers went on to develop gardens at Denbies, the theme of which was death and damnation.
Following Tyers’s death in 1767, the estate was bought by Lord King of Ockham (Property Market, February 26), who had Tyers’s collection of macabre artefacts removed and the grounds greatly altered.
In 1787, Denbies was purchased by banker Joseph Denison, who spent part of a vast fortune—gained through ‘unabated industry and the most rigid frugality’—buying up estates. He died in 1806, leaving his property to his son, William, also a banker, who increased the acreage of the Denbies demesne to 3,900 acres and created extensive, well-designed gardens. He died a bachelor in 1849, leaving his fortune to his nephew, Albert, later Baron Londesborough, who sold the Denbies estate to master builder Thomas Cubitt in 1850.
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