Parham Park

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Parham Park is an Elizabethan house in Storrington, near Pulborough, West Sussex originally owned by the Monastery of Westminster and granted to Robert Palmer by King Henry VIII in 1540.

The foundation stone was laid in 1577 by the two year old Thomas Palmer, and Parham has been a family home ever since. In 1922 the Hon. Clive Pearson, younger son of Viscount Cowdray, bought Parham from the 13th Lady Zouche, and he and his wife Alicia opened the house to visitors in 1948, after the Second World War when it had also been home to evacuee children and Canadian soldiers. Off the Long Gallery at the top of the house there is a fascinating exhibition which touches on the period between 1922 & 1948, with many family photographs as well as photographs of the building works which took place during that time.

Mr and Mrs Pearson, followed by their daughter Veronica Tritton, spent more than 60 years carefully restoring Parham and filling it with a sensitively chosen collection of beautiful old furniture, paintings and textiles, also acquiring items originally in the house. There is a particularly important collection of early needlework. What they created at Parham is a rare survival of mid 20th Century connoisseurship within a major Elizabethan house.

Now owned by a Charitable Trust, Parham House and Gardens are surrounded by some 875 acres (3.54 km²) of working agricultural and forestry land, including designated areas of Special Scientific Interest. Around the house stretch 300 acres (1.2 km²) of ancient deer park whose fallow deer are descendants of the original herd first recorded in 1628.