Parham Park

Parham Park is a country estate in the civil parish of Parham, between Storrington and Pulborough in West Sussex, England, within the South Downs National Park. Its centrepiece, Parham House, is a Grade I-listed Elizabethan country house begun in 1577 for the Palmer family on the site of an earlier fortified manor. The estate comprises historic gardens, parkland, woodland and a fallow deer park at the foot of the Downs. The house, and its stables and laundry wing to the north, are both listed Grade I; the surrounding park and gardens are registered Grade II*. Much of the wider estate is designated as the biological Parham Park SSSI, noted for its lichen flora, relict bog, rare beetles and heronry. History The manor of Parham, formerly belonging to Westminster Abbey, was granted by Henry VIII at the Dissolution of the Monasteries to Robert Palmer of Henfield in 1540. Work on the present house began in 1577 for the Palmer family. Parham's own history records that the foundation stone was laid on 28 January that year by Thomas Palmer, then aged about two and a half, following a custom that the youngest member of the household should lay the first stone. The house incorporated parts of an earlier medieval fortified house in its east wing. In 1601, Thomas Palmer sold Parham to Thomas Bisshopp of Henfield, whose family and descendants through the Zouche line owned the estate until the early 20th century. Sir Cecil Bisshopp, 8th Baronet, established a claim to the Barony of Zouche of Haryngworth in 1816 and became the 12th Baron Zouche. In 1922, Mary, 17th Baroness Zouche, sold Parham to the Hon. Clive Pearson, second son of Weetman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray. The house was then in poor repair. Over the next two decades Pearson and his wife Alicia, working with architect Albert Victor Heal, restored the house and developed much of the present garden; restoration, refurbishment and decorative work continued into the 1960s. During the Second World War, Parham housed evacuee children from London and later accommodated Canadian soldiers on the estate. It first opened regularly to the public in 1948. After Clive Pearson's death, the estate passed to his daughter Veronica Mary Tritton, who continued opening the house until her death in 1993. In 1996 the family's descendants transferred ownership to the Parham Park Trust and management of the house and estate to Parham Park Ltd. Architecture and description Historic England describes Parham as "one of the finest houses in Sussex". The house stands near the centre of the registered park and is built of malmstone, Hythe sandstone, Pulborough sandrock and ferricrete rubble with ashlar quoins, a Horsham slab roof and brick chimneys. Its principal south front is E-shaped, with projecting gabled wings and a central porch which originally formed the main entrance. The west front was partly refenestrated in 1710 by Sir Cecil Bisshopp, 5th Baronet. The main entrance was moved to the north side in about 1830–40, where a two-storey porch added in 1870 faces the Fountain Court. The house underwent alterations in 1705 and further work in the mid and late 19th century, before the 20th-century restoration by Clive Pearson and Victor Heal. The top floor contains the Long Gallery, an approximately 48 m (157 ft) room lit by dormer windows. Its painted ceiling was designed by Oliver Messel and completed in 1968. A 2025 World of Interiors feature noted oak floorboards and panelling designed by Messel. The 18th-century stables and laundry wing stand north of the house and form a courtyard. Historic England attributes the range to Sir Cecil Bisshopp, 6th Baronet, a member of the Bisshopp baronetcy. The south-facing front has a high four-centred carriage arch, parapet, square turret, octagonal clock faces, cupola and dome. The range facing the Fountain Court was enlarged in 1870–71. Collections Parham contains collections of historic furniture, paintings, books, textiles, clocks, rugs and carpets assembled or arranged during the 20th-century restoration by Clive and Alicia Pearson. The house is particularly known for its 17th-century needlework, displayed in the state rooms and gallery spaces. Art historian Jonny Yarker has described Parham's post-war interiors as a curated sequence of historic rooms. The Pearsons acquired 93 original Zouche portraits in 1922 and a further 11 in 1948, supplemented by additional purchases, and turned the Great Hall from a sitting room into a gallery of 16th-century portraits. Yarker argues that the display strategy connected the Pearsons to Parham's earlier owners and to Alicia Pearson's Knatchbull-Hugessen ancestry. A 2026 Country Life feature by John Goodall highlighted Parham's smaller domestic objects, including a shell lion believed to be 17th-century. Alicia Pearson collected the object and placed it in the Long Gallery beneath the State Saddle of James II. Goodall also noted animal imagery in Parham's interiors, including a dodo, llama and "sea cow" in the Great Parlour plasterwork, and a monkey and owl in Messel's Long Gallery ceiling. Parham was formerly associated with George Stubbs's 1772 paintings The Kongouro from New Holland and Portrait of a Large Dog, commissioned by Sir Joseph Banks after Cook's first voyage to the Pacific. The Banks material and related Knatchbull portraits had been acquired by Weetman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray, in 1918; the Pearsons continued to buy related material and acquired the Stubbs paintings in 1970. The Stubbs paintings were exhibited at Parham during public openings and are now in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. A copy of The Kongouro from New Holland hangs in the Green Room. Other Banks-related works also passed through the family collection. Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Sir Joseph Banks, formerly in the Green Room at Parham and listed in the Parham Park picture list of about 1957, descended from Clive Pearson to the Hon. Clive Gibson and was acquired from him by the National Portrait Gallery in 1986. In 1996, following the transfer of ownership to the present trust structure, Christie's held a two-day Parham Park house sale of selected furniture, works of art, silver, textiles, costume, linen, European porcelain and glass, described in the catalogue as the property of the Parham Park Trust. Gardens and parkland The registered landscape covers about 152 ha (380 acres), comprising roughly 4 ha (9.9 acres) of formal and ornamental gardens around the house and about 148 ha (370 acres) of parkland with woodland and lakes. The park surrounds the house and gardens on all sides and contains open grassland with bracken, mature oak trees, enclosed woods, copses and clumps. A resident herd of about 200 fallow deer grazes the open parkland. Natural England describes Parham Park as medieval in origin; Historic England dates the formal establishment of the park to the mid-17th century, with the first documented reference in 1643. The park boundaries have changed since enclosure from common land in the early 17th century, and the present extent of the park was largely established by 1842. South of the house, a rectangular level lawn extends to a stone ha-ha built in the mid-1960s when the lawn was extended southwards, replacing earlier iron park paling. A gravel walk along the west front leads to the Pleasure Grounds, which extend around the east end and north shore of the Pleasure Pond. The Pleasure Pond was enlarged from an earlier pond in the mid-18th century and ends in a stone balustrade built about 1863. The grounds also include Cannock House, a small three-bay classical summerhouse erected in the mid-19th century, and a three-arched stone summerhouse by Victor Heal, built in the late 1920s on the site of a late-19th-century garden building. Features in the park include an 18th-century round dovecote about 50 m (160 ft) east of the kitchen-garden wall, listed Grade II, an icehouse set into the north-west slope of Windmill Hill about 500 m (1,600 ft) north-east of the house, and St Peter's Church, a Grade I-listed church south of the house, largely rebuilt about 1820 but retaining a chapel of 1545. The walled kitchen garden lies north of the house and its stable and service courtyards. It is a rectangular enclosure measuring about 136 m × 115 m (446 ft × 377 ft), with its outline shown on Yeakell and Gardner's map of 1778. Its present ornamental structure was laid out in the 1920s by Clive Pearson and Victor Heal, with planting partly replanned and simplified by Peter Coats in 1982. The garden includes broad mixed borders, a 1927 stone summerhouse by Heal against the north wall, a two-storey children's playhouse from the 1920s, a yew-hedged herb garden, a sundial and a 30 m (98 ft) lean-to greenhouse, surviving from a set of four built by Mackenzie & Moncur of Edinburgh in 1923. The later garden design has drawn on Parham's interior collections. A 2025 World of Interiors article noted that the blue-and-gold borders were inspired by the house's needlework collection, and that Veronica's Maze took its form from a 16th-century embroidery on the house's great bed. Parham's own garden history says that Veronica's Maze was laid out in 1990 and was made of turf and brick. Alicia Pearson began the practice of arranging home-grown flowers in the house when Parham opened to the public; the arrangements used flowers grown at Parham and harmonised with the colour schemes of the rooms. Ecology Parham Park SSSI covers 263.4 ha (651 acres). Natural England cites it as having one of the richest epiphytic lichen floras in south-east England, with 165 recorded species, including Thelopsis rubella in what the citation describes as its only known locality east of the New Forest. The SSSI also contains a relict lowland raised bog with adjacent alder carr, artificial ponds and ditches with marginal plant communities, and a mix of parkland, ancient open oak woodland, beech high forest, pine, coppice and wet woodland. The site supports two rare beetles, Ampedus cardinalis and Procraerus tibialis. Natural England also records that mature Scots pines in the managed woodland hold one of the largest heronries in Sussex. Ownership and access The house, gardens and 875 acres (354 ha) of park and woodland are owned by the Parham Park Trust and managed by Parham Park Ltd. Since 1994 the chatelaine has been Lady Emma Barnard, great-niece of Veronica Tritton, who lives at the house with her family. Coverage of Parham's recent stewardship has noted Barnard's role, and her official biography as Lord-Lieutenant of West Sussex states that she chairs Parham Park Ltd. The house and gardens open to paying visitors during the season. In popular culture The feature film Haunted (1995), directed by Lewis Gilbert, was shot on location at Parham Park. Featured in Keeping Up Appearances as the location of Hyacinth and Richard's country apartment, in Series 3. References Further reading Kirk, Jayne. Parham: A Sussex House and its Restoration. Chichester: Phillimore, 2009. ISBN 9781860774850. Nairn, Ian; Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Buildings of England: Sussex. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965. Hussey, Christopher. "Parham Park, Sussex". Country Life. 1, 8 and 15 June 1951. Cornforth, John. "Parham Park Revisited". Country Life. 6 and 13 June 1985. Poore, A. Parham Park Restoration Plan. Savills, 1991. External links Media related to Parham House at Wikimedia Commons Official website Parham House, Grade I at the National Heritage List for England The Stables and Laundry Wing, Grade I at the National Heritage List for England Parham, Registered Park and Garden, Grade II* at the National Heritage List for England Parham Park SSSI at Natural England