Althorp

Althorp, ancestral home of the Spencer family since 1508. Situated north-east of Northampton, near the village of Harleston, the house was originally built as a relatively modest Tudor building. However, it has been enlarged and remodelled several times. The house holds a distinguished collection of portraits by artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Peter Paul Rubens, and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, as well as antique furniture and rare porcelain. There is a superb Palladian stable block and the grounds were landscaped by Samuel Lapidge, an assistant to Capability Brown.

Althorp has been subjected to a great deal of interest in recent years as the family home of Diana, Princess of Wales, who became internationally famous when she married Prince Charles in 1981. On her death in 1997 she was buried on an island in an ornamental lake in the grounds of the house. Her brother, Earl Spencer, made the decision not to bury her in the family tomb in a nearby village so that the family could maintain a degree of privacy around the grave. However, the house and gardens are open to the public for a few weeks each year and Diana’s family home and final resting place looks set to become a place of pilgrimage for many millions of people. In 1998, 152,000 tickets were sold and plans were being made to enlarge Althorp’s facilities to cope with even larger numbers of visitors in future years.