EXPLICIT LANGUAGE WARNING Woodchester Mansion is an unfinished, Gothic revival mansion house in Nympsfield, Gloucestershire, England. It is on the site of an earlier house known as Spring Park. The mansion is a Grade I listed building.

The mansion was abandoned by its builders in the middle of construction, leaving behind a building that appears complete from the outside, but with floors, plaster and whole rooms missing inside. It has remained in this state since the mid-1870s.

The mansion's creator William Leigh bought the Woodchester Park estate for £100,000 in 1854, demolishing the existing house, which had been home to the Ducie family.

A colony of approximately 200 greater horseshoe bats reside within the attic of the mansion, and have been studied continuously since the mid-1950s.

William Leigh was born in Liverpool, and educated at Oxford and Eton. At the time of the purchase he was living at Little Aston Hall in Staffordshire, where he had recently converted to the Roman Catholic faith. This and the Gothic Revival style in architecture were fashionable, and formed the ideology for the new house. He approached Augustus Pugin to draw up the plans.[3]

Pugin drew up plans for the house but in 1846 he became ill and the project was allowed to drop. Leigh meanwhile gave land in South Woodchester to a community of Roman Catholic Passionist fathers for a monastery and church. He then turned to Charles Francis Hansom, whose brother designed the famous Hansom cab of Victorian London, to take over the architectural planning.[8]

In 1857 Leigh dropped Hansom, and unexpectedly hired Benjamin Bucknall,[1] a young man who was an aspiring architect and assistant to Hansom, but very inexperienced.[9] Bucknall set about studying Gothic Revival architecture – the result, Woodchester Mansion, is Bucknall's masterpiece.