The house was built in 1756 on the site of an earlier property and surrounding village by
Stiff Leadbetter for
Simon Harcourt, 1st Earl Harcourt. Interiors were designed by
James Stuart and
Capability Brown designed the landscaped grounds. It is a
Grade II* listed building. Lord Harcourt demolished the original village of Nuneham Courtenay in the 1760s in order to create a landscaped park around his new villa, removing the existing village in its entirety, rebuilding it and diverting the main Oxford to London road (now the
A4074).
Oliver Goldsmith wrote of the demolition of the village and destruction of its farms to clear land to become this wealthy man's garden in his poem
The Deserted Village. Published in 1770, it expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental
landscape gardens would ruin the
peasantry. At about the same time, a church with a wide tower with a domed roof was built about a mile north of the house.
Later developments In 1904, after the death of
Sir William Harcourt, Nuneham House passed to his son,
Lewis Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt, known by many as "Loulou". He had recently married Mary Ethel Burns, a niece of
American financier and banker,
J. P. Morgan. The estate inherited by the young couple was in need of major renovation, which they could not afford. Morgan established a £52,000 ($260,000) line of credit at his
London bank for his niece, which he told her did not need to be repaid. The Harcourts used these funds to renovate the old buildings and grounds. During the
Second World War, Nuneham House and its surrounding parkland was requisitioned by the
Air Ministry and became RAF Nuneham Park, a
P.R.I.U. or photographic reconnaissance interpretation unit. Photographs taken by aircraft from
RAF Benson and other airfields over enemy territory were examined here by RAF officers as well as small contingents from the Army, Royal Navy and the USAAF.
Nissen huts and other, larger buildings were erected adjacent to the mansion, including a camp cinema which villagers were welcome to attend. The RAF station continued after the war in the same role until the mid-1950s, when the added buildings and roadways were demolished and the estate handed back to the Harcourt family, who sold it to Oxford University. The 1780 painting of the Earl and Countess Harcourt by Joshua Reynolds was accepted as payment to the Government in lieu of inheritance tax and was then allocated to the
Ashmolean Museum in 2010. The
Harcourt Arboretum, part of the tree and plant collection of the
University of Oxford Botanic Garden, occupies part of what were the grounds of Nuneham House. The landscaped parkland and pleasure gardens surrounding the house are listed Grade I on the
Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. The estate includes the privately owned, two-storey Old Rectory, built in 1759 on the northern boundary by the first Earl. It was Grade-II listed in 1963 as part of the "Nuneham Courtney Park and Garden". ==References==