Champneys
Champneys is an estate established during the medieval period near Wigginton, Hertfordshire. Today the estate comprises a large house built in the French Second Empire style and associated buildings set in its own landscaped grounds of around 200 acres (0.81 km2).
It is also the brand name of a destination spa group in the United Kingdom comprising four spa resorts and six day spas owned by the Purdew family.
The earliest record of an estate associated with the Champneys name is in 1307. It appears in the Tring manor court rolls for 1514. It was owned by successive landowning families in the Wigginton and surrounding area between the 14th and 19th centuries, although for a short period around 1535 it is recorded as owned by Thomas Cranmer, the then Archbishop of Canterbury. The grounds and original house was inherited in 1871 by the Rev. Arthur Sutton Valpy. He replaced the original building by the current French Second Empire styled house built in 1874 which stood in extensive grounds. In 1900 Champneys was sold to Lady Rothschild.
In 1925 Stanley Lief, (b.1890 — d.1962) a pioneer in the field of Naturopathy purchased the stately home of Champneys converting it into a Nature Cure resort which he ran from the 1930s for about 20 years. Champneys at Tring continued as a health resort with varying degrees of success, latterly under the ownership of a Middle Eastern consortium, until it was bought by the present owner, Stephen Purdew, in 2002.
Dorothy Purdew set up a slimming club business and opened her first club on 25 June 1970 at Frimleys, Northampton. It was a success and led to over 70 clubs opening throughout the South East. In September 1981, Dorothy and her husband Robert purchased Henlow Grange for £350,000 from Leida Costigan and one of their sons Stephen joined the company. Costigan had opened Henlow Grange in 1961 as The Beauty Farm School of Beauty and Physical Culture, the first of its kind in the UK. Following the death of Robert Purdew, Stephen took over management of the group.
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