Other in Buckinghamshire

Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire is one of the most extraordinary country houses in Britain, a French Renaissance château transported wholesale to the rolling English countryside and filled with one of the finest collections of French decorative arts outside France. Built for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild between 1874 and 1889 to designs by the French architect Hippolyte-Alexandre Destailleur, the house represented the Rothschild family's determination to create an English country seat that matched the grandeur of the great French royal residences they admired, and the result is a building of startling ambition and consummate quality. The exterior, modelled on the Loire Valley châteaux of the sixteenth century, rises from a hilltop that was entirely reshaped to receive it, the summit removed and rebuilt on a platform of unprecedented engineering complexity. Full-grown mature trees were transported by horse and steam traction up the reconfigured hillside to provide an instant mature landscape around a brand new building, a feat of horticulture and logistics that speaks clearly to the scale of the resources the Rothschilds were prepared to deploy. The result, when seen across the surrounding parkland, is genuinely impressive: a perfect French château sitting within an English park as if it had always been there. The interior contains one of the greatest collections of eighteenth-century French decorative arts in the world, assembled by successive generations of the Rothschild family with knowledge, access and financial resources that enabled them to acquire pieces of royal provenance and museum quality. Furniture made for the French royal apartments, Sèvres porcelain of the finest quality, Savonnerie carpets woven for the great French palaces and portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney hang and stand in rooms furnished to a standard that reflects both the quality of the objects and the skill of the interior decorators who arranged them. The parterre gardens below the south front and the rococo-style aviary containing exotic birds are among the most visited features of the gardens, and the wine cellars contain one of the most significant collections of historic vintages in private hands in Britain.

Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire is the historic seat of the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford, one of the great Whig aristocratic families who shaped the political and cultural history of Britain from the sixteenth century to the present day. The estate, covering approximately 3,000 acres of parkland and the famous Woburn Safari Park, has been in the Russell family's possession since Henry VIII dissolved the Cistercian abbey that previously occupied the site and granted the land to the family following their support for the Reformation. The current house, rebuilt in the Palladian style in the mid-eighteenth century, contains one of the most significant private art collections in Britain. The paintings assembled by successive Dukes of Bedford include works by Rembrandt, Canaletto, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Velázquez among many others, and the Canaletto Room alone, hung with paintings commissioned to record the state rooms of the Bedford London residence before its demolition, is one of the most remarkable single rooms in any English country house. The collection of French furniture and Sèvres porcelain is equally impressive and reflects the cosmopolitan collecting ambitions of the eighteenth-century Russells. The parkland surrounding the house was landscaped in the eighteenth century and contains one of the most celebrated deer parks in England, home to nine species of deer including the rare Père David's deer, a species extinct in the wild in China and preserved at Woburn since the late nineteenth century. The eleventh Duke of Bedford's decision to open the house and park to the public in 1955 made Woburn Abbey one of the pioneers of the heritage tourism industry in Britain, a model that many other aristocratic families subsequently followed. The formal grounds near the house include a Chinese dairy designed by Henry Holland, a sculpted garden and a riding school of elegant Georgian design. The proximity of Woburn Safari Park, separately managed but accessible as part of a combined ticket, allows visitors to combine the house visit with one of England's best-known wildlife attractions on the same day.

Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire opened in 1970 as one of the first drive-through safari parks in Britain and remains one of the most popular and extensive wildlife parks in the country, set within the grounds of the Woburn Estate and combining a traditional drive-through safari experience with a substantial walk-through and interactive section. The combination of significant acreage, a high density of charismatic large mammals and a strong conservation programme has maintained its position as one of the premier wildlife experiences available outside of a major zoological garden. The drive-through safari reserve covers several hundred acres divided into different zones, each representing a broadly different wildlife habitat region. Visitors drive their own vehicles slowly through enclosures housing lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, white rhinoceroses, bison, bears and a large variety of African and Asian ungulates that graze the pastures on either side of the road at close range. The African lion section and the White Rhino enclosure are consistent highlights, and the experience of having a giraffe crane its neck to investigate the roof of your car through the open window is one that visitors remember for years. The foot safari section provides close encounters with a further range of species including penguins, meerkats, sea lions, lemurs and smaller primates. Keeper talks and feeding demonstrations take place throughout the day at various enclosures and provide educational context for the animals on display. Woburn Safari Park contributes to international conservation through membership of the European Endangered Species Programme and participates in coordinated breeding programmes for several threatened species. The Père David's deer herd at the adjacent Woburn Abbey estate, a species that owes its survival in significant part to the Woburn collection, is one of the most historically significant conservation achievements associated with the broader estate. The park is best visited on a weekday outside school holidays to avoid the heaviest crowds, and a full visit including both the drive-through and foot safari comfortably occupies a whole day.