The labour of love of eccentric English aristocrat Sir Stewart Gore-Brown, it is approached down a long, tree-lined drive, flanked by farm buildings, settlements and workers houses, giving it the air of an old feudal domain.
They were almost caught napping early on when Barry Bannan slid a ball inside right-back Wes Brown to find Stewart Downing and it needed centre-back Rio Ferdinand to come across and clear out the danger.
By Harold Wilson's time in the 60s, even despite the Vietnam War, friends of the special relationship were fortunate: Wilson's Foreign Secretaries for most of his tenure were Labour conservatives George Brown and Michael Stewart, whose pro-American sympathies were accepted by an emollient "beer and sandwiches" Premier anxious to maintain peace in a fractious government.