Saint Hill Manor
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Saint Hill Manor is a country house at Saint Hill Green near East Grinstead, West Sussex, England. It is the location of the head office for the Church of Scientology in the United Kingdom.
Saint Hill Manor was built by Gibbs Crawford in 1792, situated on 59 acres (239,000 m²) of landscaped gardens overlooking the hills of the Weald. Previous owners included Edgar March Crookshank and Mrs. Drexrel Biddle, who commissioned the famous Monkey Mural which was painted by John Spencer-Churchill, nephew of Sir Winston Churchill. It was once owned by William Thomas Berger and for many years in the late 1800's served as the England home headquarters of the China Inland Mission. Hudson Taylor and Berger met there often and it was a centre for training recruits for the mission field.
L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, bought the mansion from Sawai Man Singh II, the Maharajah of Jaipur, in 1959. He lived there until early 1966. Much of early Scientology was developed at Saint Hill, including a key course known to Scientologists as the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.
Under Hubbard's ownership, the manor was extensively modified, with a series of extensions and new buildings constructed on the estate during the 1960s and 1970s. The largest was a mock-Norman castle built behind the main manor house after 1968 to provide a purpose-built training facility for Scientology students. The development was controversial, with the East Grinstead Urban District Council initially refusing planning permission. After a public enquiry, however, the Church of Scientology was granted permission to go ahead with the construction of "Saint Hill Castle". [1]
Hubbard declared Saint Hill to be the "org" (church) by which all other orgs would be measured, and he issued a general order (still followed by the Church today) for all orgs around the world to expand and reach "Saint Hill size." The Church of Scientology has announced that two further levels of Scientology teaching, OT 9 and OT 10, will be released and made available to church members when all the major orgs in the world have reached Saint Hill size ("size" referring to the number of people working in a particular church). [2]
[edit] External links
- Aerial photograph of Saint Hill (Multimap.com)
- Advanced Organization & Saint Hill United Kingdom (official home page)
- Saint Hill Manor (AboutBritain.com)
- Saint Hill Manor (Church of Scientology)
- L. Ron Hubbard when living in Saint Hill (brief biography) A focus on his contributions to East Grinstead
- Scientology.org: L. Ron Hubbard A Chronicle (1959 - 1967)
- Saint Hill (Jon Atack, A Piece Of Blue Sky, chapter 2)
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