Taplow Court
Taplow Court is a large Victorian house in the village of Taplow in Buckinghamshire, England, which has served as the national headquarters for the Soka Gakkai International of the United Kingdom (SGI-UK) since 1988.
The Taplow burial, a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon burial mound, is in the grounds of the house, near the parish church which is on the estate's edge and close to Maidenhead Bridge. The mound was excavated in 1883 and a number of treasures were discovered, of quality of the early Saxon centuries surpassed only by Sutton Hoo in 1939.
There has been a manor house on the site since before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The manor was owned by the monks at Merton Priory until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was then owned by the Hampson family in the 17th century, coming under attack during the English Civil War. Throughout the 18th century and through to the 1850s, Taplow Court was home to the Earl and Countess of Orkney who has also owned the adjacent Cliveden.
From 1852, Taplow Court became the home of the Grenfell family, purchased by Charles Pascoe Grenfell in August of that year. His family had it rebuilt in 1855, as it is dated, etched into the masonry. The exterior in an early Tudor style and the interior (with its central glazed hall rising the full height of the house) in Romanesque architecture. A listed building in the starting category of Grade II, it is built of red brick partly dressed in light stone and has a slate roof, has four storeys with 2 stone stringcourses carried round the building as drip moulds over the windows. It has a central projection with a porch. Here its heavy oak door is set in recess with a Norman style arch.
Taplow
Coordinates: 51°31′52″N 0°41′13″W / 51.531°N 0.687°W / 51.531; -0.687
Taplow is a village and civil parish in the South Bucks district in Buckinghamshire, England. It sits on the east bank of the River Thames facing Maidenhead, and is roughly one mile west of Burnham, Buckinghamshire and also about one mile east of Dorney Reach in Berkshire.
Taplow railway station is near the A4 south of the settled part of the village and provides access to and from Oxford, Reading and London Paddington. Its two large stately homes with parkland adjoin each other and face the Thames, Taplow Court and Cliveden and sit at the highest point of the intermittent terraced gravel formations stretching from the Chiltern Hills in the far north of the parish to beyond Windsor to the south and as far east as the edge of Central London. Each was designated by central body responsible a protected areas under the UK's statutory planning scheme (in this instance a listed park and garden).
There are two conservation areas: the Taplow Village Conservation Area and the Taplow Riverside Conservation Area.
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