Alvediston Manor,

Alvediston Alvediston is a small village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England, about east of Shaftesbury and southwest of Salisbury. The area is the source of the River Ebble and is within the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding ...

Wiltshire Wiltshire (; abbreviated Wilts) is a historic and ceremonial county in South West England with an area of . It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset to the southwest, Somerset to the west, Hampshire to the southeast, Gloucestershire ...

, England is an 18th-century house. From 1968 until his death in 1977, it was the home of the former

prime minister A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister i ...

Anthony Eden. The manor is a

Grade II listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Ir ...

History and description

The

manor house A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals w ...

at Alvediston dates from the mid-18th century.

Nikolaus Pevsner Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (1 ...

, in his

Buildings of England The Pevsner Architectural Guides are a series of guide books to the architecture of Great Britain and Ireland. Begun in the 1940s by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the 46 volumes of the original Buildings of England series were publish ...

, notes that the house is "of brick, in a stone county". It is of two storeys and is five bays wide and stands in the centre of the village. In 1968, the house was bought by Anthony Eden, using funds from the sale of his memoirs. His wife,

Clarissa ''Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage'' is an epist ...

designed the garden and Eden kept a small herd of

Hereford cattle The Hereford is a British breed of beef cattle originally from Herefordshire in the West Midlands of England. It has spread to many countries – there are more than five million purebred Hereford cattle in over fifty nations worldwide. The bre ...

at the farm he purchased at the same time. In 1975, his last volume of memoirs, ''Another World'', was written at Alvediston. Eden died at the house on 14 January 1977 and is buried in the village churchyard. Alvediston is a

Grade II Listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Ir ...

, with the garages, and the garden walls, which Pevsner noted were "nicely curved", and the gates and gate piers having separate Grade II listings.

Footnotes

References

Sources

* * * {{cite book , last1 = Rhodes James , first1 = Robert , authorlink1 = Robert Rhodes James , title = Anthony Eden: A Biography , year = 1986 , url = https://www.worldcat.org/title/anthony-eden/oclc/185680845?referer=br&ht=edition , publisher =

Weidenfeld & Nicolson Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd (established 1949), often shortened to W&N or Weidenfeld, is a British publisher of fiction and reference books. It has been a division of the French-owned Orion Publishing Group since 1991. History George Weidenfeld a ...

, location = London , isbn = 9780297789895 , oclc = 185680845 Houses completed in the 18th century Grade II listed houses Grade II listed buildings in Wiltshire Prime ministerial homes in the United Kingdom