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Berryfield House

Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire

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Berryfield House, 1920s

The southern façade of Berryfield House in the 1920s

A house on the site was advertised for sale with 24 acres of land by wool-dyer Charles Timbrell in 1836; it had been occupied by Thomas Clark Hillier on a lease from Timbrell. It was described as having an “entrance lodge (on Bath Road), 6-stall stable, 2 coach-houses with servants’ sleeping-rooms over, large walled garden, hothouse, farm yard etc., 4 sitting-rooms, 2 conservatories leading from drawing to dining rooms, 8 bed-rooms, 2 dressing-rooms, laundry, servants’ hall, and very extensive cellarage”. It was marked as ‘Mansion House’ on the 1841 Tithe Map.

It was presumably purchased by Ezekiel Edmonds sr, clothier and a Liberal MP who had been living at Abbey House in Church Street. By the late 1840s the house had been rebuilt, or at least remodelled, as the present building, but Edmonds died in 1852.

By 1871 it was the property of Michael Palmer (1814-1891), a partner in a Trowbridge cloth factory. Palmer purchased the adjoining Leigh Park estate after the death of Miss Isabella Rebecca Poynder in 1880 and added much of its land to Berryfield, leaving Leigh House with grounds and gardens of 19 acres, which he sold off. Kelly’s Directory for 1915 described Berryfield House as then standing in about 60 acres of land. It was let to barrister Gerald Augustus Robert Fitzgerald KC (1844-1925) in the early part of the 20th century and then belonged to Michael’s son, the benefactor Brigadier General Llewellen Palmer MP who died in 1932.

It was put up for auction at the Swan Hotel with vacant possession in 1930, with the land reduced to about 43 acres. Some of the missing acres would probably have been accounted for by the 1930s ‘ribbon development’ of houses along the eastern side of Bath Road (by The Manor Building Co. of Ascot).

In 1939 Berryfield was requisitioned by the government as a maternity hospital for mothers who had been evacuated to escape from wartime bombing of London. It continued to serve that function after the war and the formation of the National Health Service, right up to 1979 when it became Bradford on Avon Hospital, replacing Leigh Park which became a hotel. Some extra accommodation was added to the west of the main building.

Gradually, the estate that Michael Palmer had built up has been redeveloped. Housing estates ate into the land, with the Leigh Park Road estate, Christchurch Road and Berryfield Road in 1970s, also a nurses’ home that is now sheltered housing and called Cedar Court. The new premises for Christ Church Junior School were built in 1957, followed by the Infants’ School in 1968.

The hospital closed in 2006 and Berryfield has been converted to housing, with the house divided, a house built in the walled garden, stables turned into dwellings and some new buildings. Towards the Bath Road side a care home called Wiltshire Heights opened in 2013. A little of the old parkland still remains.

The name Berryfield has nothing to do with berries, but has a common derivation with the neighbouring area called Bearfield, which is not related to bears, but to barley.

The name for the road through the grounds, Manor Gardens, is a modern invention- Berryfield was not a manor.