Sandridge Park

Sandridge Park, near Stoke Gabriel, Devon, is an English country house in the Italianate style, designed by John Nash around 1805^[1] for the Dowager Lady Ashburton, née Elizabeth Baring.

Sandridge, on high ground at the head of the River Dart estuary, was held by the Sandridges under the Bishop of Exeter in Henry II's reign. The Nash house took the place of the former house, which had belonged to the descendants of Sir Thomas Pomeroy until the eighteenth century.^[2] "Gilbert, Esq." was the owner in 1763; it was unoccupied in 1951, "the park ragged and decaying".^[3] Captain John Davis, the great Elizabethan navigator and explorer, was probably born at Sandridge Barton, the manor farm, in 1543.

Another, less architecturally distinguished, Sandridge Park (51°22′53″N 2°05′41″W / 51.3814°N 2.0947°W)—a villa built around 1850 near Melksham, Wiltshire—was for a time a headquarters of General Dwight D. Eisenhower during the Second World War and is now open as a hotel.

Notes

1. A design was exhibited by Nash at the Royal Academy exhibition, 1805. (Colvin)
2. Pomeroy family in Devon
3. W. G. Hoskins, Devon (1954), quoted at http://www.devon.gov.uk/etched?url=etched/ixbin/hixclient.exe&_IXP_=1&_IXR=110411

References

• Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 3rd ed. 1995: "John Nash"
• Devon County Council: Stoke Gabriel

Coordinates: 50°23′50″N 3°36′19″W / 50.3971°N 3.6054°W