Amport House


Amport House, was the home of the British Armed Forces Chaplaincy Centre, until March 2020 when AFCC moved to Beckett House, Shrivenham, nr Swindon and the site sold. Amport House is a manor house in the village of Amport, near Andover, Hampshire. It is now a Grade II listed building.

History

The current house, which was built in an Elizabethan style, was constructed near the village of Amport in 1857 by John Paulet, 14th Marquess of Winchester and replaced two earlier houses built on the site. The last of the Paulet family to reside at Amport was Henry Paulet, 16th Marquess of Winchester, who sold the estate in lots between November 1918 and July 1919. Not long afterwards the house was purchased by Colonel Sofer Whitburn DSO, who in 1923 engaged Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll to redesign the gardens.
At the start of the Second World War, the house was requisitioned to be used as the headquarters of Royal Air Force Maintenance Command; as well as ceding them use of the house, Sofer Whitburn is said to have donated his entire wine cellar to the Officers' Mess as a patriotic gesture. He sold the house in 1943 ; ultimately the RAF itself bought the property in 1957. Later that year the Royal Air Force Chaplains' School moved from Dowdeswell Court in Dowdeswell to Amport House. The School, which had included a Royal Navy chaplain staff member, became the tri-service Armed Forces Chaplaincy Centre in 1996 on the closure of the depot of the Royal Army Chaplains' Department at Bagshot Park.
A converted stable block of the house no longer holds the Museum of Army Chaplaincy; the museum is moving to a new site at Beckett Lodge, Shrivenham, near Swindon and is due to open in late 2020. There is also a gatehouse and a pleached avenue of lime trees, believed to be the longest such avenue in the United Kingdom.

Future

In September 2016 it was announced that Amport House would be put up for sale by the Ministry of Defence as part of a programme of defence estate rationalisation. A Better Defence Estate, published in November 2016, indicates that the site will close by 2020, which it subsequently did and was relocated to Shrivenham.