The Grove, Watford
country house hotel in Sarratt, Hertfordshire, England, UK
The Grove is a large resort hotel in Hertfordshire, England, with a 300–acre (1.2 km2) private park next to the River Gade and the Grand Union Canal. It touches on its north-west corner the M25 motorway and remains a small part in Watford. The estate is situated within three different settlements; most of the land and all of the mansion itself are in the civil parish of Sarratt, and also in the ecclesiastical parish of Langleybury, while the estate lies within the post town of Rickmansworth.
Originally built as an English country house on the site of a medieval manor house, The Grove served as the family seat of the Earls of Clarendon (second creation), the Villiers family, from 1776–c.1920. Since its Georgian construction, The Grove has been altered and extended four times by a number of noted architects, including Surveyor of the King's Works, Robert Taylor.
Following the increase in estate duty in 1914, the Villiers Family sold off the house and estate. Today it operates as a hotel with 214 guest rooms, a luxury spa, 16 meeting & event spaces and an 18-hole championship golf course.
Local geography
The majority of the estate, including the mansion is in the post town of Rickmansworth, having postal prefix WD3. However, the east including the former mill is in Watford's first subdivision of post town (WD17). Watford was the estate's parish in all forms of local geography from 1086 until 1878.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7738384. Authority coordinates are 51.678, -0.436. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1776, 1920, 1914 and 1086.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Grove, Watford” 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.