page_title: Cliveden
section_title: Spring Cottage
hierarchical_section_title: Cliveden / Gardens and grounds / Spring Cottage
caption_attribution_description: English: Spring Cottage on the Cliveden Estate from the River Thames.
context_page_description: Cliveden is an English country house and estate in the care of the National Trust in Buckinghamshire, on the border with Berkshire. The Italianate mansion, also known as Cliveden House, crowns an outlying ridge of the Chiltern Hills close to the South Bucks villages of Burnham and Taplow. The main house sits 40 metres above the banks of the River Thames, and its grounds slope down to the river. Cliveden has become one of the National Trust's most popular pay-for-entry visitor attractions, hosting 483,754 visitors in 2018.
  Cliveden has been the home to a Prince of Wales, two Dukes, an Earl, and finally the Viscounts Astor. As the home of Nancy Astor, wife of the 2nd Viscount Astor, Cliveden was the meeting place of the Cliveden Set of the 1920s and 30s—a group of political intellectuals. Later, during the early 1960s when it was the home of the 3rd Viscount Astor, it became the setting for key events of the notorious Profumo affair. After the Astor family stopped living there, by the 1970s it was leased to Stanford University, which used it as an overseas campus. Today the house is leased to a company that runs it as a five-star hotel.
context_section_description: This is the largest and most complex of the four timber-framed cottages designed or altered by the architect George Devey along the banks of the River Thames on the Cliveden estate. The first structure on the site was a Gothic-style summerhouse with an octagonal vaulted plaster ceiling designed in 1813 by architect Peter Nicholson for Mary, 4th Countess of Orkney. She was living in one wing of the burnt down mansion at the time of the commission. It was used as a tea house and spa for the many visitors attracted to the nearby mineral springs, which flowed from the chalk cliff above and ran down into the Thames. Nicholson published his designs for the house in his Architectural Dictionary of 1813 in the form of a cross-section of the interior and ceiling projection. In auction particulars dated 1821, which list all structures on the estate, the building is described as a Banqueting house "at the much admired spring", while several decades later it was described as an "ornamental fishing villa."
  In 1857, the Duke of Sutherland, who had owned Cliveden for eight years, commissioned George Devey to enlarge the existing building into a two-storey cottage. The subsequent alterations were in the vernacular style with brick and stucco walls, fish-scale pattern roof slates, a Gothick-style loggia and a turret above an exterior staircase leading to a balcony. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century the main purpose of the cottage was as a place of leisure, and it was frequently used by the Duke's wife Harriet to entertain guests, most notably her friend Queen Victoria.
  In 1957, the cottage came to the attention of London osteopath Stephen Ward, who had been hired to treat Bill Astor. He leased the cottage from the Astors for a minimal rent for use as a weekend retreat. Among the guests invited to stay there were Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. A chance meeting in 1961 between Keeler and cabinet minister John Profumo (a guest of the Astors) at the Cliveden swimming pool led to the Profumo affair which so damaged the Macmillan government.
  Spring Cottage was awarded Grade II listed status in 1986, and in 1997 the hotel company which leased Cliveden House from the National Trust also acquired the lease to the cottage. A reported £750,000 was spent restoring and refurbishing the dilapidated building before it reopened in 1998 as a self-contained luxury holiday let. The cottage and its garden are not open to the public.
caption: The west front of Spring Cottage across the River Thames with the Cliveden beechwoods behind.
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