Drinking Fountain Esher linked to Comte de Paris

Long essays could be written about Esher and its connections to Claremont House.

Claremont was variously occupied by the Duke of Newcastle, Clive of India, Princess Charlotte (heir to George IV) and her husband Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Princess Victoria before she became Queen, who lent it to the exiled French King Louis-Philippe and Queen Marie-Amelie after the 1848 Revolution.

Their grandson was Prince Philippe, the Comte de Paris and Duc d'Orleans, who married the Infanta of Spain in St Raphael's Catholic Church in Kingston-upon-Thames on Portsmouth Road.

The inscription on the back of the Fountain reads:

"This fountain occupies the site of a pump given to the village by the munificence of HRH the Comte del Paris on his marriage with the Infanta of Spain AD 1864. In the year 1876 the water supplied by the pump was declared by the Sanitary Authority to be impure, and unfit for use, and the pump was subsequently removed."