Woodcote Park

Woodcote Park is a Grade II* listed stately home and estate of about 350 acres (1.4 km2; 0.5 sq mi) near Epsom, Surrey, England, currently owned by the Royal Automobile Club.

The interior of the house once boasted a gilded library and number of fine murals by notable Italian artists including Antonio Verrio, but most of the historic rooms were removed by the RAC, which had purchased the estate in 1913, and what remained was destroyed by fire in 1934.

[1] The land comprising Woodcote was originally part of the estate of the Manor of Horton, granted by the abbot of Chertsey to John Merston and his wife Rose in 1440.

[2] Woodcote was inherited with Horton Manor by Elizabeth, wife of Richard Evelyn who in 1679 built the estate’s main mansion house.

[3] Elizabeth Evelyn bequeathed both Horton Manor and Woodcote Park to Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, a remote "connexion" of her family and proprietary governor of the colony of Maryland.

[8] Calvert made many changes to the house, including adding a Palladian facade by John Vardy, though Lord Baltimore's brothers complained that he "pulled down everything" and "finished nothing".

According to Horace Walpole, Frederick spent large sums of money making the interior of the house "tawdry" and "ridiculous" in what Calvert called the "French" style.

[18][19] Initially, the hospital had 500 beds in Farm Camp section of the site, but this was soon expanded to receive the first patients who were Australian and New Zealand troops from the Gallipoli campaign.

[16] In 1927, the interior of one of the mansion's drawing rooms, noted for its excellent carved wood panelling and other decorations in the style of Thomas Chippendale (possibly originally designed for Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore), was shipped to the United States and installed in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, Massachusetts.

[24] In 1934 the house was gutted by fire, leaving very little of the Evelyn mansion and losing works of art by artists including Rubens, Verrio, and Zuccarelli.

[27] In the summer of 1940, during the height of the Battle of Britain, a Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft was forced to land on the golf course of Woodcote Park.

The pilot received medical assistance in the RAC clubhouse, having first proved that he was not an enemy airman by waving a packet of Players cigarettes at nearby golfers.

Woodcote Park circa 1840 by J H Kernot, published in Edward William Brayley 's Topographical History of Surrey , 1842.
During the Battle of Britain a Hawker Hurricane aircraft was forced to land on the club golf course.