Another article generated from my fascination with Google Earth. It’s nice to have a blog to complement the pins I stick in the globe – you can put a lot more pictures here too.

If you’ve downloaded Google Earth (it’s free and fun so get on with it), you can pick up my post here.

I visited this little dump circa 1981 on my British tour. It’s no Buckingham Palace but I suppose if you’re absolutely homeless it would do in a pinch.

Blenheim Palace, home of a whole string of Dukes of Marlborough and the place where Winston Churchill was born, is a little northwest of Oxford, an hour’s drive from both London and Birmingham, and 45 minutes from Stratford-upon-Avon.
Blenheim Palace is open to the unwashed masses now, to pay for the upkeep, see, and since that doesn’t seem to bring in enough, you can rent some properties from the estate’s overseers, and they’ll sell you some mineral water too.
Blenheim Palace takes its name from the decisive August 13, 1704, battle on the River Danube, near a small village called Blindheim (Blenheim), where John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, routed France’s Marshall Tallardwon and the forces of Louis XIV, thus defending Holland and Austria from invasion and “saving Europe from French domination”, as the palace’s website puts it. As a reward for his win, Queen Anne handed Marlborough the Royal Manor of Woodstock and promised nearly £250,000 to build the house that would become Blenheim Palace.
Sir J Vanbrugh got busy on the pile of bricks in 1705 and didn’t get finished until 1722. In the meantime, though, with the Duke off whacking away at more foreign enemies, jealous types hatched a plot to darken the Queen’s opinion of him. As a result of the gossip, much of the pledged money never arrived, so the Duke had to cough up £45,000 to pay off Vanbrugh and his sub-contractors.
In the astonishing Red Drawing Room hangs a 1778 painting by Reynolds of the 4th Duke of Marlborough and his family and another by Sargent with a couple of dukes, father and son, and a mum named Consuelo, who was one of the Vanderbilts. There’s also a Van Dyck portrait of some countess.
The regal 55-metre-long Long Library was designed as a picture gallery, and sure enough it’s got full-length pictures of Queen Anne, King William III and the 1st Duke of Marlborough, not to mention a magnificent Willis organ.
More interesting than the fantastic artworks is the little-ish bedroom in which Sir Winston Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, several weeks early and keen to get on with things. Blenheim was never his home, the estate and title secured from under him by his cousin “Sunny”, the 9th Duke.
Winnie proposed to Clementine Hozier out in the garden in 1908, and apparently she said okay. They’re in bronze around here somewhere, and he’s in a lot of photos and stamps on view, and they’ve still got some of his hair.
When he’d had enough of life in 1965, he was buried beside his parents, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill, in the churchyard at Bladon, the tower of which you can see from Blenheim’s saloon. Cheers.