Attingham Park - Shrewsbury, Shropshire (NT)
This 18th-century mansion with Regency interiors & deer park, landscaped by Humphrey Repton, was the ancestral home of the Berwick family for over 150 years. It was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1947 by the 8th Lord Berwick. A lovely memorial to the 8th Lord & Lady Berwick sits within the woodland park a short walk from the mansion.
Attingham Park was designed by George Steuart (1730-1806) and built between in 1783 and 1785 on the site of an earlier house known as Turn Hall.
During the second world war, the house was the home to the fighter pilots and officers from the RAF & 8th USAAF Station at RAF Atcham, built on the Attingham estate. Atcham operated as a airfield from August 1941 as part of Fighter Command and was then taken over in 1942 by the USAF for the 31st Fighter Group of the 8th Air Force, the first such group to operate in Britain. Atcham was discontinued as an active military base in October 1946. At the height of Atcham's occupation more than 250 structures spread over an area of three square miles including much of the deer park. In 1975 the national trust set about recovering the park and farmland and so today very little evidence of these structures, runways and taxiways remain.
In 1948, Sir George Trevelan (1906-1998), who grew up in his family's Northumberland home, Wallington Hall, was appointed Warden and Principle of an adult training college at Attingham Park where he carried out pioneering work in the teaching of spiritual knowledge. On Sir George's retirement in 1971, the college closed.