County in England
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire has the Prime Minister's country retreat, the wartime codebreakers' base, Roald Dahl's writing hut and a town whose football club is nicknamed the Chairboys.
Key information
- County
- Buckinghamshire (often shortened to Bucks)
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Chequers, Bletchley Park, Waddesdon Manor, the Chiltern Hills, Pinewood Studios, Aylesbury ducks
- What locals are called
- Buckinghamshire folk, or simply Bucks people
- Famous people
- Roald Dahl, Benjamin Disraeli, John Hampden, William Penn
- Football clubs
- Wycombe Wanderers, Milton Keynes Dons, Aylesbury United
About Buckinghamshire
The county that hides the Prime Minister
Tucked into the Chiltern Hills is Chequers, the Tudor-era country house that has been the Prime Minister's weekend retreat since 1921. Arthur Lee gave it to the nation, and Lloyd George was the first premier to use it. Since then it has hosted wartime strategy talks, awkward diplomacy and some very quiet Sunday lunches. Buckinghamshire has a long habit of attracting power. Benjamin Disraeli made his home at Hughenden Manor near High Wycombe, and the Rothschilds built a French-style château at Waddesdon between 1874 and 1889 for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. It was designed for weekend house parties and for showing off a remarkable art collection. Then there is Cliveden, the Taplow estate where a 1961 poolside meeting helped set off the Profumo affair, one of the great political scandals of the century.
Where the codebreakers cracked the war
Bletchley Park is a Victorian mansion and a scatter of wartime huts, and during the Second World War it was the home of Britain's codebreakers. Thousands of people, many of them young women, worked in strict secrecy to read enemy messages, including those protected by the German Enigma machine. Alan Turing is the best-known name, but the workforce was far bigger and kept its silence for decades. The town around it is now part of Milton Keynes, which brings the county's second big surprise. Designated in 1967, Milton Keynes was planned from scratch with a grid of roads, plenty of roundabouts and a lot of trees. Its famous concrete cows, made in the 1970s, still graze a field there. The Open University is based in the city, and Red Bull's Formula One team has its home there too.
Chairs, ducks and a very odd job
The beech woods of the Chilterns gave High Wycombe its great trade: chairmaking. Travelling craftsmen known as bodgers turned chair legs in the woods, and the town became a furniture capital. Wycombe Wanderers still carry the nickname the Chairboys, and a chair features in the town's identity. Aylesbury, the county town, gave its name to the white Aylesbury duck, a breed that was a prized table bird for generations. The town's pubs and shop signs still remember it. Buckinghamshire also has a famous parliamentary loophole. MPs cannot simply resign, so they apply for an unpaid Crown office, the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, which disqualifies them from sitting. The Chiltern Hundreds are three old districts of the county: Stoke, Desborough and Burnham. Nobody has to do any actual stewarding.
Dahl, dissenters and a very English rebellion
Roald Dahl lived in Great Missenden for decades and wrote many of his classics in a hut in his garden. Today the village has a museum devoted to him, and the high street seems to carry a little of his mischief. The county has a record of strong-minded locals. John Hampden of Great Hampden refused to pay Charles I's ship money tax in the 1630s, and the case became a landmark in the road to civil war. William Penn, the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, is buried at Jordans, a quiet Quaker meeting house in the Chilterns. At West Wycombe, Sir Francis Dashwood is remembered for the Hellfire Club and the caves he had dug in the hillside, which you can still walk through.
Red kites, film stars and pancakes
The Chilterns are the setting for one of Britain's great wildlife comebacks. Red kites were reintroduced here from 1989, and now the forked-tailed birds wheel over the M40 and the beech woods in numbers that would have astonished a Victorian naturalist. For film fans, Pinewood Studios at Iver Heath opened in 1936 and has been home to James Bond, the Carry On films and countless other productions. On Shrove Tuesday the town of Olney holds its pancake race. Local women, in aprons and headscarves, run to the church with frying pans, tossing pancakes as they go. The tradition is said to go back to 1445, and Olney has a friendly rivalry with a town in Kansas that holds its own version. The county symbol is a swan, and the Stowe landscape gardens, with their temples and lakes, were shaped by Capability Brown when he was a young head gardener there.