User:JuanGut/Howbery Park

Howbery Park is an English manor house built in about 1850 by English MP William Seymour Blackstone in Crowmarsh Gifford near Wallingford. Blackstone fell into debt, largely because of the costs of building this new home, and spent time in the debtors prison at Oxford. His debt problems also contributed to the end of his political career. He died in Brighton, never having lived at Howbery Park.

Other owners of Howbery Park were Henry Bertie Williams-Wynn (who purchased the house in 1867), Harvey Du Cross (in 1902) and George Faber.

The estate passed into the ownership of the government in the 1930s as was used during the Second World War to house US and Canadian servicemen and then refugees from Central Europe. After the war it was selected as the location for the new Hydraulic Research Station (HRS) established under the Directorship of Sir Claude Inglis.

The development of hydraulic modelling on site culminated with the completion of the Main Hall and, by the early 1970, with the construction of the wide-span Mapling Building (currently Froude Modelling Hall) to house a large model of the Thames Estuary.

HRS was privatised in 1982 from the Department of the Environment (DoE) and HR Wallingford Group was created. The new company was limited by guarantee, had no shareholders and was given the remit to invest in hydraulic research. The assets transferred with Howbery Park included the grant-funded-state-of-the-art- Fountain Building, and the recently installed mainframe computer.