High Elms Country Park

High Elms Country Park is an extensive 250-acre public park on the North Downs in Farnborough in the London Borough of Bromley. It is a Local Nature Reserve, and together with the neighbouring Downe Bank, a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The park surrounds High Elms Golf Course, and has extensive woodland, chiefly oak and beech, chalk meadows and formal gardens. It also has a cafe, a visitor centre, nature and history trails and car parks.

The history of the High Elms estate can be traced back to the Norman Conquest, when it was given by William the Conqueror to his half-brother, Odo, bishop of Bayeux. For successive generations afterwards the land occupied now by the golf course was given over to farming. In 1809 a wealthy London Banker and Member of Parliament, John William Lubbock, bought the 260 acres, which we now know as the High Elms Estate as a country residence and in 1840 the astronomer and banker, Sir John Lubbock, 3rd Baronetinherited it. He built a grand new mansion in the Italian style. After Charles Darwin moved in 1842 into the nearby Down House on the other side of the village of Downe, Lubbock's son, also called John Lubbock, the fourth baronet, and later Baron Avebury, befriended him, being a frequent visitor to Down House.

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