Later Owners of Coley (1727–1937)

The sale of 1727 transferred Coley from a long-established local gentry family to a new class of owner. Colonel Richard Thompson, who had made his fortune as a merchant in Jamaica before retiring to England in 1711, purchased the indebted estate from William Vachell. Under Thompson the property remained a substantial country seat on the edge of Reading; family papers preserved in local archives link the Coley estate to Caribbean plantations, a reminder that some of the wealth behind the purchase derived from enslaved labour overseas.

After Thompson's death the estate passed through his daughters. In 1792 Dame Anne Jennings Clerke and her sister Frances Jennings conveyed Coley to the Hampshire landowner William Chamberlayne, bringing the property into a wider portfolio of southern English estates. A subsequent sale in 1802 transferred Coley to Thomas Bradford and then to John McConnell, who rebuilt the main house on a new site further north, creating the early nineteenth-century Coley House whose fabric partly survives today.

In 1810 McConnell sold the estate to John Berkeley Monck. Under the Monck family Coley Park was developed as a landscaped Georgian estate, while the town of Reading expanded steadily towards its boundaries. John Berkeley Monck's grandson, William Berkeley Monck, served twice as Mayor of Reading (1887 and 1897), underlining the continued civic prominence of the family. Coley Park remained in Monck hands until 1937, when the estate was finally broken up and sold. The former parkland has since been absorbed into the modern suburb of Coley Park, but the surviving house — now incorporated into a private hospital — and traces of the old walled gardens still mark the site of the former manor.

Further Reading

• Royal Berkshire Archives, online articles on the Coley Park estate and its owners.
• Christopher Clay, Landlords and Estate Management in England.
• Kevin Rosier, Coley Park and Beyond (local history website), especially the owner biographies for Thompson, Chamberlayne, Bradford, McConnell and the Monck family.