Hotham Park House
country house in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, England, UK
Hotham Park House is a Grade II* listed 18th-century country house in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, England. It stands in the 22-acre (8.9 ha) Hotham Park, now a public open space.
The house, originally called Chapel House after a nearby chapel, was built in 1792 by Sir Richard Hotham, the founder of Bognor, as his main residence. After the chapel was demolished in the 1850s, the house was renamed Bersted Lodge, then Aldwick Manor and subsequently Hotham Lodge. It is built of stuccoed brick in two storeys with a six-bay (but 10 window) frontage.
History
Sir Richard Hotham, a London hatter, moved to the Bognor area in the late 18th century and laid the foundation stone of the town in 1787. He commissioned the building of the present house, with its own private chapel, in 1792, but died a few years later in 1799.
In the early 1800s, the house belonged to a Jamaican planter Thomas Smith who had married Susannah Mackworth-Praed. He died in 1825 but his widow continued to live in the house until her own death in 1856. Her brother-in-law, John Bourke, 4th Earl of Mayo, died there in 1849.
“Hotham Park House” enters the record as country house in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, England, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hotham, Park and House can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15225903. Authority coordinates are 50.787, -0.667. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1792, 1787, 1799 and 1825.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hotham Park House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.