 Hello, thank you for joining me. I'm just walking along the road in Charleston, Peter I'm about half a mile away from the village center and today we're going to Charlfort Park now most people if you go to Charlfort Park you wouldn't come the way I'm coming but the reason I'm bringing you this way is because I want to show you the original entrance so this is the old road to Buckingham that way and if you went that way you'd have ended up in Uxbridge and and just here it's not that exciting now but this would have been the gateway to Charlfort Park you can just see there a gate post so you're going to driven off up there about 40 yards away is the dual carriage radio 413 so there's not much left of this but I've wanted to start this video like we were arriving the old way through the old gate so what I'm going to do now I'm going to trace my steps that way I'm going to walk around and into Charlfort Park if I wanted to I could go that way and go for a footpath down through the woods but I'm going to go back that way and what I'll do is we shall end up on the other side a 413 about this point and we should continue up towards Charlfort Park so here we are on the other side the A413 we were literally just over there a moment ago and the drive would have somehow swept across here around the corner and along here in this direction so I'm not sure the exact point of where the drive would have run but what we're doing is we're kind of following roughly in the footsteps of you know how it would have been when you arrived here so what happens now I will continue on and we shall soon be near the house we'll have a look at some of the ground of the house over the other side the trees there is George Cross golf club so that's been built on the wider estate so really all of what you see now would have been you know Parkland you know when you go up a drive sometimes to some of these big stately homes and you're just sort of driving through Parkland it'd have been like that really but like so I'm not sure the exact position of where the drive would have been but it would have been somewhere here but as I said it's unfortunately been all obliterated by the A413 because of course the original A413 would have been where we were at the start of the video so I'll just show you the dual carriage right now again so you can see quite a large chunk it's taken out of it over there you notice woods just down there that's where one of the tributaries of the rhythm is born starts if you have a look out for my tributaries of the Mistborn video link on screen now and you'll see that and in that video we do come to Chalford Park because some of the tributaries as well as the main river flow through Chalford Park and I did say that I would come back and do a video on Chalford Park and the house and the estate so now the current driveway is just over there I'm on this cycle path which doesn't really go anywhere other than Chalford Park I remember them building it I'm not sure if the point was for it to go all the way to Denham which would have been really useful to have been able to cycle to Denham to Auxford which I'm not sure about that or if it was purely for people who work in the business park which is also here at Chalford Park which we shall get on to fairly soon once we get close to the house and we look around the estate so we're just continuing along here now I know this isn't the most exciting part of the estate but it's gonna get better so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna carry on walking along here when I get to a more interesting part of the estate I should show you well we are now reaching the end of this cycleway see what I mean it kind of just ends there a bit abruptly not sure why and here whether it is purely for people who work here because there isn't really anywhere you could safely cycle on if you go along there to the end of this road you end up on the A413 where it's a dual carriageway so you know there's no kind of nice real way to carry on cycling but if you want to come here for a walk it's a really nice place you can walk around and see the estate so if you look here we've got some of the original wall or whilst original the estate's been here you know hundreds of years it goes back to the 12th century so obviously that's not 12th century that's the modern business part we'll kind of look at that in a minute so the estate goes back to the 12th and 13th century it's gone through various you know owners and different people have inherited it it's a very complex history so what I'm gonna focus on in today's video is the house we see today and what we see today and when it was put there so the main house is it well it was built in 1755 but it was extended by the architect John Nash who designed Brighton Pavilion so he designed really most of what you'll see on the outside today so it's that that I'm most interested in and it's that that we are coming to look at so if you get to here the view opens out we can see the house in front of us and flowing along here is one of those tributaries of the River Miesbarn which as I said we did a separate video on that so we come to here it's lovely big London playing and a nice big cedar tree and here is the Chalford Park house so we're just going to go and have a look so you can if you walk up there you can kind of go around the back and you can go and see the lake which if you watch my miss born series we do have a look at the lake but now it's beautiful house so it's all offices now I remember there's been a big ugly extension when I was a child it was like a 50s or 60s built extension that was all demolished but the business part they replaced it with isn't that much more exciting this London plane and it's huge look how big that trunk is really lovely trees let's have a look up there so yeah let's go and have a look there was a cricket pitch dare tell a few years ago but that all seems to have been closed down this house it was a hotel at one point this house and it was also used in the spy film the 1965 spy film Thunderbolt so and it does it does seem to appear in various other old films probably because we're not too far away from various studios such as Pinewood and of course there was Denham studio so that's probably why it appears in so many films so that you haven't one last look at the front let's go around the back so as we go round here onto the lawn there's a lot of Canada geese so as for the grounds of the house capability Brown came here to do a feasibility study of the estate to see if he could landscape it but he didn't get the job in the end the job went to Humphrey Repton who was kind of his rival quite a lot of country houses were either capability Brown or Humphrey Wepton Humphrey Repton did the Shard Lowe's estate which we went to on the River Mearsbourne series the River Mearsbourne flows through two Humphrey Repton estates just rather nice pond here the back of the house so the back of the house it's this gothic style they call it a strawberry Hill gothic style which I think is a really attractive style one day we should go to strawberry Hill house in London and make a video there but now let's go over to the lake so this is all the Humphrey Repton Parkland so I think probably where the A413 is that probably would have had a lot more of Humphrey Repton's work the grounds would have been laid out but unfortunately the road was put through it but here is the River Mearsbourne I do remember as a child there weren't so many bushes so you could stand on the other side of the lake and get a really nice picture looking across at the house which that view kind of isn't possible anymore but here is the River Mearsbourne it's dug out like a lake and if you look that way you get a nice view of the house so there was a big that area there where those where there's a carpark behind the hedge that was a big ugly 1960s building which like I say it was demolished in about 2000 and they replaced it with the business part you see today which isn't that much more attractive but I'm gonna leave the lake now we'll come back to the river soon it's so clear that water let's go and leave the lake I want to go and show you some more former gardens that were once here well and to a certain extent still are here but have been altered to accommodate today's office needs it's interesting though when you look at the house from this angle kind of gives the impression that you know these what are now external walls have at some point not been external walls there's a vegetable patch there growing tomatoes that's quite nice I quite like this build now I'm not exactly sure when this one was added you can see it's got the castle tower if we go over here we'll go and walk through it so if I'd come here 20 years ago I'd have been in the middle inside the middle of a 1960s laboratory style building and so it's changed quite a lot but somehow this building I'd love to see if anyone's got any pictures of how it all was in the 60s I'd love to see them because this would have been somehow in the middle and I've only got about one picture I've ever seen of how it was and giving some clues away to how it's been here for years that you've got some critical windows here which you know they're really dangerous species so if we come through here leaving the castellated house gate house behind us I'm not sure that was intended to be a gate house maybe this was the entrance to the stables because somewhere around here there would have been stables now it's going to put the old Italian gardens I know parts of these were designed by Edwin Luchens I'm not sure if this building here was but certainly when we go through here it has all been been changed over the years but what you see looking down there was designed by Edwin Luchens the building at the end was the old gardeners cottage it's now a nursery for children and how many children go to a nursery that was designed by Edwin Luchens the way you see this grass with the pond in the middle it would have once stepped down so there were steps going down to a pond in the middle so yeah it's really quite an attractive garden and it's kind of it sort of works as it is today with the offices although really I'd rather it just was as it was but I suppose you know as times move on things change and I suppose it just isn't possible that every country state can be a national trust place or indeed a tourist attraction but at least we can you know still walk around and enjoy parts of it one thing I'm not sure someone might be able to tell me is if this is fed by the River Misborn because as we know River Misborn flows along behind the offices over there is this fed by the River Misborn or is it you know a separate water system I'm sure also it could have more water in it I think I have seen it filled right up so we're now just coming up towards the Garden's Cottage so just imagine these buildings aren't here I'm trying to imagine me you know in the in the 1920s strolling through an Italian eight garden obviously I wouldn't have a camera in my hand making a video but you know and so yeah here we are this is the this is what I believe is the Garden's Cottage designed by Edwin Luchens and if you look that way you get the vista off down through what was the Italian eight gardens to Chalfant Court House let's go find the real River Misborn again because I always enjoy a walk by a river and so I'm just gonna take you through this not so exciting area behind the office although we do get a better view of the other side of Garden's Cottage and the Kitting Garden would have been somewhere over there and place we're going to now is just through here we're going to go down this little path and go down here and that's where we should see the more of the river now if you watch my tributaries of River Misborn video you will have seen we did come down here before because one of the tributaries springs out the ground just here it's hard to see but on the other side of that fence and so I want to finish we've been here twice before now where we're going to but it's part of the Misborn I really like went here on the tributaries of the Misborn and we went here on the main River Misborn series we are going to go to where the small River Misborn which is just here in these woods flows down a cascade into the lake so this is this is my favourite part the gardens I just always like it it's nice and peaceful and there we have the cascade so from in the woods by the cascade in Chalford Park hope you enjoyed this video thanks very much for watching please do feel free to like subscribe comment in the area come and have a walk around here for yourself thanks very much for watching good bye