page_title: Nuneham Courtenay
section_title: New village
hierarchical_section_title: Nuneham Courtenay / History / Newenham—Nuneham Manor / New village
caption_attribution_description: English: Nuneham House Oxfordshire
context_page_description: Nuneham Courtenay is a village and civil parish about 5 miles southeast of Oxford; it occupies a pronounced section of left bank of the River Thames.
context_section_description: The new village comprised two identical rows of brick-built semi-detached cottages, each of a single main storey plus an attic floor with dormer windows. The two identical rows face each other across the Oxford–Reading and Henley-on-Thames (i.e. south-east) main road, which had been made a turnpike in 1736. (It has been classified the A4074 since the 20th century.) As the village population has subsequently grown, additional cottages have been added in similar styles early in the 19th century and again early in the 20th century. The old village had a village green. The new village has none, but was built to a spacious plan with gardens for every cottage and verges between them and the main road.
  In the 1760s the Irish writer, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of a medieval village and destruction of its farms to clear land to become a wealthy man's garden. His poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry.  The Deserted Village gave the demolished medieval village the pseudonym "Sweet Auburn" and Goldsmith did not disclose the real village on which he based it. He did, however, indicate it was about 50 miles (80 km) from London and it is widely believed to have been Nuneham Courtenay.
caption: Nuneham House overlooking the Thames.
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