Another in the occasional series on historical sites on the “London Loop” (London Outer Orbital Path)  walk …

Bentley Priory in Stanmore was an Augustinian Priory built by Ranulf de Glanville in 1170, and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1546, thereafter passing into private ownership. The original building was taken down, and the present one, designed by Sir John Soane,  put up in 1777. The present building was variously owned and occupied by the Marquis of Abercorn, the Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen, the dowager Queen Adelaide (widow of William IV) and Sir John Kelk in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, before being converted to a hotel in the late nineteenth and a girls’ school in the early twentieth, and finally being bought by the RAF in 1926. In 1940, it served  as the head-quarters from which the Battle of Britain was directed, by Air Chief Marshall Sir (later Lord) Hugh “Stuffy” Dowding, the Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command (memorably portrayed by Laurence Olivier in the 1969 film “The Battle of Britain”).  The building now  houses the the recently-opened RAF Battle of Britain Museum.