Stoke Park, Buckinghamshire

Where it sits. Stoke Park lies at Stoke Poges in south Buckinghamshire, a few kilometres north of Slough and about five from the M4, with Heathrow's flight paths overhead and Pinewood Studios barely three kilometres to the north-east. That last fact explains a great deal of what follows. The estate covers roughly 300 acres of parkland, lakes and monuments, with a white Georgian mansion set on rising ground at the centre and a golf course wrapped around it. The land has been documented since Domesday and stayed in one line of descent for over five centuries before passing to the Crown in 1581 to settle the debts of the Earl of Huntingdon.

The story behind it. What visitors see today is largely the work of one man's inheritance. John Penn, grandson of William Penn, received a substantial payment from the new United States government for his family's enormous landholding in Pennsylvania, and spent a large share of it here. He commissioned James Wyatt, architect to George III, who worked on the mansion and its garden monuments from 1790 to 1813; the central block was completed in 1788, and its columned, domed silhouette is often compared with the later United States Capitol. The parkland is the joint product of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, who produced his scheme in 1792. Immediately south stands the churchyard of St Giles, Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray wrote the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; Penn had Wyatt build the monument to Gray that still sits beside it. The estate is listed Grade II on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

Golf, and why the course matters. In 1908 Nick "Pa" Lane Jackson, founder of the Corinthian sporting club, bought the estate and converted it into what is generally reckoned Britain's first country club. He hired Harry Colt — the architect of Sunningdale, Wentworth, Muirfield and Royal Portrush — to lay out a course, and the whole conversion, course, tennis courts and clubhouse, was finished within eight months. It opened in July 1909 to immediate acclaim; Bernard Darwin wrote it up admiringly in 1910. The course now runs to 27 holes, and its short seventh, played across water, is among the most discussed one-shot holes in English golf. Tournament history runs from the News of the World Match Play in 1928 and 1937 through the Agfa-Gevaert events of the 1960s, and since 2002 the grass courts have hosted the Boodles tennis challenge in the week before Wimbledon.

On screen. The golf match in Goldfinger (1964) is the reason this estate is on any Bond itinerary. The script places the game at the fictional Royal St Marks in Kent, Fleming's stand-in for Royal St George's, but every frame was shot here at Stoke Park: Sean Connery's Bond and Gert Fröbe's Auric Goldfinger playing for a bar of Nazi gold, the ball substitution that decides the match at the eighteenth, Oddjob's steel-brimmed bowler beheading a statue beside the clubhouse. It is one of the most closely studied sequences in the series and it gave Connery a lifelong golfing habit. Thirty-three years later the estate returned in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), this time indoors: the ballroom stood in for the interior of the Hamburg hotel where Pierce Brosnan's Bond drinks a vodka, resumes his affair with Paris Carver, and is later ambushed by Dr Kaufman. Beyond Bond, the mansion, lakes and Pennsylvania Suite carry the mini-break and rowing scenes of Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), and Daniel Craig's Layer Cake (2004) ends on the mansion steps. Dead of Night (1945) had used the exterior for its golfing ghost story decades earlier, and Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla (2008) used the tennis courts and the 21st green.

What you actually see today. The composition from the golf course looking back at the mansion — white stone, terraces, cupola, lake in the foreground, cedars behind — is exactly the one Bernard Darwin described as a dazzling vision, and it is unchanged in the Bond footage. Wyatt's garden monuments, the lakes and the mature parkland trees survive; so does the older Manor House fabric rebuilt in 1555. The estate was bought by Reliance Industries in April 2021 and entered a long restoration programme, so public access has been much reduced compared with the years when it operated as a hotel, spa and country club. Anyone planning a visit should confirm current arrangements directly rather than assume the golf, dining or accommodation are open.

Getting there and timing. Slough station is about four kilometres away and now sits on the Elizabeth line, putting central London within forty minutes; Heathrow is eleven kilometres south and the M4 and M40 are both close. Summer is the season for the parkland and the tennis; the churchyard and Gray's monument next door are free and open year-round and make a short, worthwhile detour for anyone who cannot get through the estate gates.