Titsey is one of the largest surviving historic estates in Surrey. It dates back to the mid-sixteenth century, though the first impression now is of a comfortable early-nineteenth century house in a picturesque park, under the North Downs which hereabout rise to over 800 feet. It is difficult to believe that this well-preserved stretch of country is barely twenty miles from the centre of London: only the M25 motorway intrudes into a landscape which otherwise has hardly changed in the last hundred years. The estate was originally bought in 1534 by Sir John Gresham, of the famous London merchant dynasty, and descended in the early-nineteenth century through the female line to the Leveson Gowers, a cadet branch of the family of the Dukes of Sutherland. The Leveson Gower family lived at Titsey until the death of Thomas Leveson Gower in 1992.