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Palace

Cliveden

England · 17th century

Founded
1666
Style
Renaissance Revival architecture
Architect
Charles Barry
Heritage status
Grade I listed building · Grade I listed park and garden
Location
Taplow
Coordinates
51.55833°, -0.68833°
Links
OpenStreetMap · Wikimedia Commons
Open on the map →Official website ↗Wikipedia ↗
Cliveden in England
Photo: Antony McCallum · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Description

Cliveden (pronounced) is an English country house and estate in the care of the National Trust in Buckinghamshire, on the border with Berkshire. The Italianate mansion, also known as Cliveden House, crowns an outlying ridge of the Chiltern Hills close to the South Bucks villages of Taplow and Burnham. The main house sits 40 metres (130 ft) above the banks of the River Thames, and its grounds slope down to the river. There have been three houses on this site. The first was built in 1666 and burned down in 1795, while the second house was constructed around 1824 and was also destroyed by fire, in 1849. The present Grade I listed house was built in 1851 by the architect Charles Barry for the 2nd Duke of Sutherland.

Cliveden has been the home to a Prince of Wales, two dukes, an earl, and finally the Viscounts Astor. As the home of Nancy Astor, wife of the 2nd Viscount Astor, Cliveden was the meeting place during the 1920s and 1930s of the Cliveden Set, a group of political intellectuals. Later, during the early 1960s, when it was the home of the 3rd Viscount Astor, it became the setting for key events of the notorious Profumo affair. After the Astor family stopped living there, by the 1970s, it was leased to Stanford University, which used it as an overseas campus. It is now leased to a company that runs it as a luxury hotel.

The 375-acre (152 ha) gardens and woodlands are open to the public, together with parts of the house on certain days. Cliveden has been one of the National Trust's most popular pay-for-entry visitor attractions, and hosted 563,416 visitors in 2025.

Text adapted from “Cliveden” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the rankings

Cliveden ranks #683 of 9,902 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #58 of the 397 mapped in England. Founded 1666, it is older than 25% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 755 atlas entries founded in the 17th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 14,762 times in the last 60 days, more than 96% of the atlas. 3 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is London, 39 km away. See how England compares in the castle statistics.

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