Braziers Park

Braziers Park is a country house and Grade II* listed building at Ipsden, Oxfordshire, England. The house is owned and operated by a friendly society as a residential adult education college, and centre for the School of Integrative Social Research. Today the school predominantly functions as an intentional community. The house once belonged to the Fleming family, and the room that was once Ian Fleming's nursery is now a library. HistoryBraziers Park was built in the late 17th century, and modelled in the Strawberry Hill Gothic style of architecture by Daniel Harris on behalf of Isaac George Manley in 1799. As a teenager, Manley had been a naval officer with Captain Cook on the first voyage of the Endeavour 1768–71; and was later Vice Admiral of the Red, and as commander of captured the French corvette Legere in 1796. He was made a Rear Admiral in 1809. In 1839, Frances Eliza Grenfell, later a biographer, was living at Braziers Park with her sisters, and was visited by novelist Charles Kingsley, then a Cambridge undergraduate. Kingsley later fictionalized this meeting as that of Argemone with Lancelot Smith in his first novel Yeast . Despite Fanny having taken a vow of chastity with her sisters at Braziers Park, she and Kingsley married in Bath in 1844.

Braziers Park is a country house and Grade II* listed building at Ipsden, Oxfordshire, England. The house is owned and operated by a friendly society as a residential adult education college, and centre for the School of Integrative Social Research. Today the school predominantly functions as an intentional community. The house once belonged to the Fleming family, and the room that was once Ian Fleming's nursery is now a library. HistoryBraziers Park was built in the late 17th century, and modelled in the Strawberry Hill Gothic style of architecture by Daniel Harris on behalf of Isaac George Manley in 1799. As a teenager, Manley had been a naval officer with Captain Cook on the first voyage of the Endeavour 1768–71; and was later Vice Admiral of the Red, and as commander of captured the French corvette Legere in 1796. He was made a Rear Admiral in 1809. In 1839, Frances Eliza Grenfell, later a biographer, was living at Braziers Park with her sisters, and was visited by novelist Charles Kingsley, then a Cambridge undergraduate. Kingsley later fictionalized this meeting as that of Argemone with Lancelot Smith in his first novel Yeast . Despite Fanny having taken a vow of chastity with her sisters at Braziers Park, she and Kingsley married in Bath in 1844.