Rowneybury House
house in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, England

Rowneybury House is a house in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, England.
The property on which Rowneybury stands was part of Pishiobury before being divided in the 1880s. It was owned by Hertfordshire County Council and used as a home for children with disabilities. The original property had two upper floors, and a cellar under the majority of the main building. After lying empty for several years, it was purchased from the Council and renovated. In 1999, the property was purchased by Spice Girl Victoria Beckham and her husband David Beckham for £2.5 million. The property became dubbed "Beckingham Palace" by the press as a portmanteau of their surname and Buckingham Palace. They spent around £3 million on refurbishment, including a maze designed by James Gardner, in the grounds. In 2001, Victoria Beckham made a virtual tour of the mansion available online.
The property was put up for sale by the Beckhams in 2013.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Rowneybury House” is house in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, England. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Rowneybury, House and house, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4878727. Authority coordinates are 51.798, 0.136. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2001 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rowneybury 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.