This page is one of several pages which are based on articles in our book entitled Royal Leamington Spa, A History in 100 Buildings which was published in 2018 and is no longer in print.
When the provisions of the Leamington Priors Enclosure Act were implemented in 1768, of the 867 acres allotted by the commissioners, over half of it was awarded to Mr Matthew Wise. The Wise allotment of 472 acres made Matthew Wise the largest land owner in the parish with a holding marginally larger than that of the Willes family.
Matthew Wise was the grandson of Henry Wise, a garden designer and nurseryman who was Royal Gardner to Queen Anne and King George I. Henry Wise had been responsible for the layout of many important gardens including Hampton Court and Kensington Palace. Through his gardening endeavours he had become a wealthy man and in 1727 had purchased the estate and mansion known as The Priory in Warwick. At his death in 1738 his estate was said to be worth £200,000. Henry’s money was the foundation of wealth for the Leamington branch of the Wise family.
Henry’s grandson Matthew lived for a period in the old Manor House in Leamington Priors which many will remember as the Manor House Hotel. He subsequently owned a house in Bath Street before commissioning architect Henry Hakewill to design a new villa for him on land he had recently acquired on a hilltop site to the south west of the rapidly expanding town of Leamington. Hakewill’s neo-classical villa was begun in 1822 but was unfinished when Matthew Wise died in 1825. The handsome new mansion was a stuccoed, square house of twelve bedrooms with a Greek Doric porch and a curved bay and verandah on the garden side, very much like Dr Jephson’s house, Beech Lawn. It stood within an expansive park close to stabling for twelve horses and the estate farm and was approached by a curved drive from Tachbrook Road via a mock-Tudor gatehouse’
Successive members of the Wise family lived at the Hall and retained a large household staff which numbered twelve at the time of the 1861 census. Several of the family trained for the ministry and became incumbents of local Anglican churches.
As befitted their social standing, they were also very philanthropic and the extensive grounds at the Hall were regularly made available for the county agricultural show, Scout & Guide camps and garden fêtes and in 1913, to Mr B C Hucks for a flying display and pleasure flights.
Members of the Wise family continued to live at the Hall until the death of Henry Edward Wise, MA, JP, in November 1923. Henry was the grandson of Matthew Wise who had built the house a century earlier and he had been born there in 1856. As the last male heir and a bachelor, after his death the contents of the house were sold in a four-day auction in December 1924. The following year Miss N Gurney Callier took on a tenancy of the hall and opened it as a high-class boarding school for girls which had removed from nearby Daventry. The school ran successfully for a decade before moving to Cawston House, near Rugby, when Shrubland Hall and the surrounding parkland were sold for development. The Hall was demolished, the site developed under the mid-1930s South Leamington Housing Development Plan and was renamed the Kingsway Estate.
Alan Griffin, 2018
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS are presented at the end of this page — https://leamingtonhistory.co.uk/articles-from-royal-leamington-spa-a-history-in-100-buildings/