Halstead Manor Is Real: Inside Badminton House, the $52,000-Acre Estate Behind Netflix's The Gentlemen Series

If you have spent any time in the last few weeks watching The Gentlemen Season 2 on Netflix and wondering where exactly Halstead Manor is — the vast, crumbling, magnificent English estate at the centre of Guy Ritchie's criminal aristocracy saga — you are not alone. The question is being searched in extraordinary numbers right now, and the answer is both simpler and more extraordinary than most people expect.

Halstead Manor is not a set. It is not a composite of several locations stitched together in post-production. The exterior of Halstead Manor — the north front, the east front, the sweeping parkland, the red deer herd that makes a brief appearance in the Season 2 trailer — is Badminton House, Gloucestershire. The ancestral seat of the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. A Grade I listed Palladian country house set within 52,000 acres of English countryside, 15 miles northeast of Bristol. Recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086 as "Madmintune." In continuous occupation by the same family for over three and a half centuries.

And it gave its name to a sport played by 220 million people worldwide.

This is not just the real Halstead Manor. It is one of the most extraordinary private estates in England — and one of the least known outside the circles that have always known about it.

Why Guy Ritchie Chose Badminton

The decision to film The Gentlemen at Badminton was not accidental, and the reasoning behind it reveals something important about what Guy Ritchie was trying to achieve with the series.

"Badminton felt immediately right for Halstead, because it's a proper, lived-in home, rather than a National Trust museum," explained location manager Iggy Ellis when the first season aired in March 2024. "There'd be walking sticks by the door or a few shotgun rounds from where they'd been out shooting. There were cracks and tired bits, as you'd get in every family home. But there were also oil paintings and history and majesty."

That combination — the cracks alongside the majesty, the lived-in quality alongside the grandeur — is precisely what The Gentlemen is about. The series is built on the tension between old money and organised crime, between the inherited dignity of an aristocratic estate and the thoroughly contemporary chaos that Eddie Horniman discovers beneath it. To film that story against a backdrop that felt like a museum piece, pristine and untouched, would have been a contradiction. Badminton House, a home that has been continuously inhabited by the same ducal family since the late 17th century, provided exactly the right register: genuinely grand, genuinely historic, and genuinely alive.

For Season 2, the production team returned to Badminton in June and July 2025, filming across the North Front, the East Front, the North Hall, the East Room, the garages, and the estate parkland — bringing with them a fleet of luxury sports cars, a helicopter, and a red deer herd that requires no transportation whatsoever, having lived on the estate for centuries.

The Real History Behind the Fictional Estate

The history of Badminton House is, in several respects, as extraordinary as anything Guy Ritchie has invented for the Horniman family.

The manor of Badminton — recorded as "Madmintune" in the Domesday Book of 1086 — was purchased in 1612 by Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester, from Nicholas Boteler. Edward Somerset's third son, Sir Thomas Somerset, modernised the old house in the late 1620s, building a new T-shaped gabled range that would form the foundation of the estate as it exists today.

The Dukes of Beaufort acquired Badminton in the late 17th century, when the family moved from Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire — a castle that had been ruined in the English Civil War, leaving the family in need of a new principal seat. They chose well. The house that greeted them was substantial. What they did with it over the following century was extraordinary.

The 3rd Duke of Beaufort remodelled the house on an ambitious scale, working with three architects at successive stages: Francis Smith of Warwick; then James Gibbs, from 1730 to 1735, who designed the Great Hall — frequently described as one of the greatest rooms in Britain — and the pavilions at the east and west ends of the north facade; and finally William Kent, who dramatically altered the north facade, adding the huge central pediment and domed open cupolas that define the building's most photographed view.

The Great Hall that Gibbs designed, and that William Kent furnished, retains its 18th-century appearance almost entirely intact. The Corinthian columns rise to elaborate plasterwork by Francis Smith. John Wootton's large-scale equestrian hunting canvases hang as they have for nearly three centuries. The mahogany furniture is attributed to Kent himself. And in one corner of that room, on a rainy afternoon in the 1860s — accounts differ on the exact year — the children of the 8th Duke of Beaufort invented a game. They called it Badminton, after the house. Today, 220 million people play it worldwide.

The Estate: 52,000 Acres and a Deer Herd That Appeared on Screen

The house is, in many ways, the smallest part of Badminton. The estate that surrounds it covers 52,000 acres — approximately 81 square miles of Gloucestershire countryside, which makes it one of the largest privately held landed estates in England still in the hands of a single family.

At the beginning of the 18th century, the 1st Duke of Beaufort laid out the park with an arrangement of avenues radiating from the house across the countryside on a scale that a contemporary described as "befitting the county's only ducal seat." At one point southeast of the house, 28 separate avenues converged — a geometric ambition that reflects the confidence of an era when English aristocracy built not for the immediate future but for generations.

Today, the park boasts a herd of approximately 400 fallow, red, and Virginia deer — the red deer herd that appears briefly in The Gentlemen Season 2, filmed in the estate parkland during the 2025 production shoot. They were not brought in for the cameras. They have been there, in various configurations of the same herd, for as long as the Beauforts have been at Badminton.

The estate also contains the remains of several Roman villas, predating the house by more than a millennium. It contains an 18th-century church — St. Michael and All Angels, connected directly to the house — whose chancel houses Grinling Gibbons's monument to the 1st Duke, relocated from St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. And it contains Worcester Lodge, the Grade I listed gate lodge at the main entrance to the park, designed by William Kent in the 1740s and considered one of the finest gate lodges in England.

This is the landscape that Iggy Ellis chose for Halstead Manor. Not because it was convenient or affordable, but because nothing else in England quite looks like it — or feels like it.

What The Gentlemen Gets Right — And What It Changes

The fictional Halstead Manor is, in The Gentlemen's universe, a cannabis empire concealed beneath the floorboards of English aristocracy — a sprawling underground farm operated by tenants who pay their rent in a currency Eddie Horniman never anticipated inheriting. The second season expands the story's geography significantly, moving from the Gloucestershire countryside to Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, but Halstead — and by extension Badminton — remains the emotional centre of the show.

What the series captures accurately about Badminton is precisely what Iggy Ellis described: the combination of genuine grandeur and genuine wear. A house that has been lived in for 350 years does not look like a showroom. It looks like a home — one where extraordinary things have accumulated over centuries because the people living in them found them extraordinary, not because they were curated for display.

What the series changes is mostly interior. While the exterior of Halstead Manor is Badminton's north and east fronts, the interior scenes were filmed at multiple other locations: Stoke Court in Buckinghamshire for parts of the manor corridors, Loseley Park in Surrey for the opulent inner sanctums and woodland scenes, and — for the American tycoon Stanley Johnston's rival estate of Bridgewater House — the neo-Palladian Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire.

The geography of Halstead Manor, as experienced by a viewer of The Gentlemen, is therefore a composite — several of England's finest private houses assembled into a single fictional estate. But the face of that estate, the image that defines Halstead in the imagination of the show's audience, is Badminton. Unmistakably, completely, and correctly.

For those drawn to the kind of historic English country houses that Badminton represents, the 70 million-pound Cotswolds Manor that recently came to the market offers a rare opportunity to own a piece of the same tradition — the same Palladian language, the same English countryside setting, and the same combination of historical weight and contemporary private life.

Badminton Beyond the Screen: Horse Trials, Weddings, and the Estate Today

Outside of its Netflix career, Badminton House is perhaps best known internationally as the home of the Badminton Horse Trials — the most prestigious three-day equestrian event in the world, established by the 10th Duke of Beaufort in 1949 and held annually in the estate parkland each May. The cross-country course, which passes within sight of the house's north front, has been televised annually for decades, making Badminton House one of the most frequently photographed English country houses on earth — recognised by equestrian enthusiasts worldwide even before Netflix arrived.

The estate today is still the primary residence of the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. It is not a heritage property administered by the National Trust. It is not a hotel. It is a private home — one of the largest and most historically significant in England — that happens to host one of the world's great sporting events each spring and, since 2024, to double as the setting for one of Netflix's most watched series.

The house contains 38 rooms, including 20 bedrooms and bathrooms, and an art collection that includes two Canaletto paintings. It is the kind of interior that rewards close attention — the kind where, if you are fortunate enough to see it, you spend the first hour understanding the scale and the second hour noticing the details. The Chinese Bedroom, designed by William and John Linnell in 1753–55, is considered one of the earliest examples of Chinoiserie in England. The library contains volumes that have been accumulating since the house was first built.

Weddings and private events can be arranged at Badminton House. Occasionally, properties on the estate are available for rental. These opportunities are rare. They are not widely advertised. For those who understand what they represent — an evening, or a weekend, within 52,000 acres of privately held English countryside, in a house that has been in the same family since the 1660s — the rarity is, as always, part of the point.

The same discretion that defines the most extraordinary addresses in the world — from the hidden villas perched above Monaco to the secretive private estates of the French Riviera — defines Badminton. It does not advertise itself. It does not need to. The 52,000 acres have been there for three and a half centuries. They will be there long after The Gentlemen has concluded its run on Netflix.

A Final Note for Fans of the Show

If you are watching The Gentlemen Season 2 and finding yourself distracted by the architecture — by the way the light falls across the north front in the early morning, by the proportions of the rooms that Theo James moves through as Eddie Horniman, by the particular quality of English countryside parkland that surrounds the house — you are responding to something real.

Badminton House is extraordinary. The 52,000 acres around it are extraordinary. And the 350-year history of the family that has lived there — the same family that is living there now, as the cameras set up on the east front and the luxury sports cars are arranged in the foreground — is exactly as extraordinary as anything Guy Ritchie has invented to take place within it.

The Gentlemen is a great show. Badminton House was there before it. And it will be there long after. For those who want to understand what the world's most extraordinary private residences actually look like when they have been lived in for generations — not renovated, not staged, but genuinely inhabited across centuries — this is what it looks like. Walking sticks by the door. A few shotgun rounds on the hall table. Oil paintings on every wall. And 400 deer in the park outside, entirely indifferent to the Netflix crew filming around them.

That is Halstead Manor. That is Badminton. And it is, without question, one of the most extraordinary private estates in England. Alongside the most expensive private estates in the world, Badminton represents something rarer still — not the biggest, not the most expensive, but the most deeply, irreversibly, completely itself.

Badminton House is located in the village of Badminton, South Gloucestershire, approximately 15 miles northeast of Bristol. The estate covers 52,000 acres and remains the private residence of the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. The Gentlemen Season 2 is streaming now on Netflix. Filming at Badminton took place in June and July 2025.

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