Deepdene House and Gardens

The name is generally agreed to mean "deep valley", referring to the narrow, natural hollow in the hillside in the grounds.

[2] Following the death of Henry Howard, 15th Earl of Arundel in 1652, the manor of Dorking (including the Deepdene) passed to his fourth son, Charles.

His son, the 11th Duke, established Arundel Castle as his seat and let the Deepdene to the playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

In 1818, Hope commissioned the architect, William Atkinson to remodel the existing house, adding a tower and two new wings.

[15] Tube-train sized tunnels were dug into the hillside to create offices for operational control staff and the railway telephone exchange.

[15] Following the end of the war, most railway personnel returned to London, but the telephone exchange remained operational until the final British Rail staff were withdrawn in March 1966.

[2][19] The architectural critic, Pevsner, summed up the demise of Hope's masterpiece as a "disgraceful and depressing story".

Covenants were placed on the land to ensure that it was kept "as a natural and peaceful woodland pleasure resort for the free use and enjoyment of the public".

In 1970, the J. Gordon Elsworth Memorial Fund awarded money to improve and extend paths and to provide seating.

[25][26][27] Thomas Hope, who lived in the house in the 1820s, was a major collector of, among other things, Ancient Greek pottery.

This name-vase passed from the Hope Collection at Deepdene to the Honorable Marshall Brooks at Tarporley and thence to William Randolph Hearst, who donated the amphora to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it has the accession number 50.8.21.