Introduction
Once belonging to the Abbey of Chertsey, the Doomsday records show the first reference to Hatchlands was in 1086. It was granted by Henry VIII to Sir Anthony Browne and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald (commonly known as 'The Fair Geraldine'), in 1544. The first visual record of the park is shown on a John Seller map of 1693.

Robert Adams interior
The interior of Hatchlands Park is Robert Adam's earliest documented work in an English country house. The mid 18th-century house is surrounded by a 430 acre park, which would be remarkable anywhere, but is a great rarity in such close proximity to London.

Admiral and Fanny Boscawen
Hatchlands Park was built by the third son of the 1st Viscount Falmouth, Admiral The Hon. Edward Boscawen, one of the naval heroes of the 18th-century. Boscawen is remembered for several actions against the French, especially for the victory at the Battle of Louisburg in 1758, and for his destruction of a fleet off Lagos Bay, Portugal, in 1759.

The Admiral bought the estate c1750, demolished the old house and employed an architect, Stiff Leadbetter, to build on a different site. Boscawen and his wife Fanny showed a great interest in the design of the house and took advice from Robert Adam on its decoration. A nautical theme runs through designs for the rooms (1759): anchors, cannon, dolphins and sea-nymphs are presided over by Neptune himself. The Admiral did not long enjoy what his wife called 'this verdant mansion' as he died in 1761, aged 49.

Hatchlands Park is set in a beautiful 170-ha (430-acre) Repton park with a small garden by Gertrude Jekyll.

©NTPL / David Hall

From Sumner to Rendel
Fanny Boscawen sold the estate in 1770 to William Sumner of the East India Company. Towards the end of the century, Joseph Bonomi, ARA, was commissioned to alter several rooms and to impose a frontispiece on the west front. Much of his work was undone in the late 19th-century.

In 1888 the Sumners sold Hatchlands to Stuart Rendel who, at one time, was managing partner of Sir William Armstrong's engineering firm and who was MP for Montgomeryshire from 1880 to 1894. He was raised to the peerage as Lord Rendel of Hatchlands in 1895. At Hatchlands he was largely his own architect, but he also employed his nephew by marriage, Halsey Ricardo, and commissioned Reginald Blomfield to build the Music Room. Rendel coloured and gilded Adam's ceilings, embellished the staircase with rococo decorations and switched the main entrance of the house to the east.

In 1913 Hatchlands Park was inherited by Lord Rendel's grandson, Harry Goodhart, who took on his grandfather's surname as a condition of the inheritance. H.S. Goodhart-Rendel was a soldier, composer, pianist and writer, as well as an architect. His treatment of the house was conservative, and he directed his energies towards new buildings in East Clandon and elsewhere on the estate.

©NTPL / Bill Batten

Hatchlands comes to the National Trust
Goodhart-Rendel gave Hatchlands to the National Trust in 1945, and after his death in 1959, the Trust let Hatchlands for residential or institutional use with the house opening by appointment only. From 1982 the main rooms were opened on a regular basis, but the shortage of contents made it difficult to do justice to the grandeur of Adam's rooms. In 1987 the house was leased to Mr and Mrs Alec Cobbe who brought to it their historic family collections of portraits, old master paintings, books, furniture and the collection of composer keyboard instruments, now cared for by the Cobbe Collection Trust.