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2022Caversham Park
Caversham Park is a Victorian-era stately home with parkland in the suburb of Caversham on the outskirts of Reading, England. Historically located in Oxfordshire, it became part of Berkshire with boundary changes in 1911. Caversham Park was home to BBC Monitoring and BBC Radio Berkshire. The park is listed as Grade II in the English Heritage Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
The present building, inspired by Italian baroque palaces, was erected after a fire in 1850 by architect Horace Jones, who much later also designed London’s Tower Bridge. Its then owner William Crawshay II, an ironmaster nicknamed the ‘Iron King’, had the house rebuilt over an iron frame, an early example for this technique. Jones inserted his seven-bay block between two colonnades of 1840 by John Thistlewood Crew (called J. T. Crews by Pevsner and English Heritage) which apparently survived the fire.
During the First World War, part of the building was used as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers. In 1923, The Oratory School bought the house and about 120 hectares (300 acres) of the estate’s remaining 730 hectares (1,800 acres). The principal of the school was Edward Pereira. The legacy of the estate’s days as a school remains with a chapel building and graves for three boys, one of whom died during World War II in 1940, the other two having died from accident and sickness in the 1920s.
The residential area of Caversham Park Village was developed in the 1960s on some of the parkland.[19] The Local nature reserve Clayfield Copse was part of the land belonging to Caversham Park.[20]
When approaching Reading via the A3290 (formerly part of the A329(M) motorway) northbound near the A4 junction, Caversham Park is a clearly visible landmark dominating the wooded hill on the opposite side of the Thames.












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