ISKCON Bhaktivedanta Manor

From Piggotts Manor to Hare Krishna Land

The estate of Piggotts Manor was built in 1898 as a Tudor Revival country house for a London industrialist. In 1973, after Srila Prabhupada expressed the need for a UK ashram with rural land for cow protection, George Harrison purchased the manor outright and gifted it to ISKCON, personally traveling with Srila Prabhupada to consecrate the deities of Sri Sri Radha-Gokulananda on September 3, 1973. Harrison’s only condition was that there would always be Krishna consciousness on the property — a condition that ISKCON has kept for over five decades.

Through the 1970s and 1980s the Manor grew into the UK’s largest Hindu ashram, at one time housing over 100 full-time devotees. In the 1990s, local residents objected to the growing number of public pilgrims and Hertsmere Borough Council ruled that the Manor could only hold a limited number of Sunday services per year. A landmark legal battle, supported by the British Hindu community and advocated by Harrison himself, ended with a 1996 House of Lords ruling permitting unrestricted public worship at the Manor — a watershed decision for religious freedom in Britain that secured the right of Hindu places of worship in the UK.

Janmashtami 70,000 and the Harrison Memorial Grove

Annual Janmashtami celebrations have grown to over 70,000 devotees — the largest Hindu religious gathering in the UK — spread over four days with fifteen stages of kirtan, dance, prasadam and abhishek. In 2013, on the Manor’s 40th anniversary, Olivia and Dhani Harrison formally opened the Harrison Memorial Grove, planted with trees gifted from every continent. In 2023, the Manor celebrated 50 years of continuous deity worship with a full rajadhiraj abhishek attended by ISKCON’s senior gurus, the Lord Mayor of London and descendants of the Harrison family.

Today the Manor operates the Bhakti School primary school, a 24-hour free ambulance-style Food for Life kitchen serving 3,000 meals weekly to the disadvantaged, the renowned goshala rescue and breeding programme, and organised Vraja Mandala parikrama replicating Vrindavan’s holy sites within the Manor grounds. The Manor is also the editorial home of UK editions of Back to Godhead magazine and the European headquarters of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust.

Fifty years of unbroken Arca-Vigraha seva

What distinguishes Bhaktivedanta Manor among ISKCON temples globally is its 50-year unbroken record of Arca-Vigraha seva — the full six-aarti daily worship cycle of the Deities without a single interruption since September 3, 1973. Through severe English winters, World War II-style snow storms, foot-and-mouth disease restrictions on livestock, multiple zoning battles, and the COVID-19 pandemic (during which a small core of resident devotees maintained worship under lockdown), the deities of Sri Sri Radha-Gokulananda have been awoken, bathed, dressed, fed and put to rest by a succession of 200+ pujaris over five decades. This continuity is unique among Western Vaishnava temples and is a source of particular pride for ISKCON.

The Manor's goshala — a working cow-protection sanctuary with over 40 rescued Indian, Ayrshire and Jersey cows — is one of the very few in the West still practicing traditional ahimsa husbandry. The bulls are not slaughtered but instead live out their natural lifespan as working draft animals helping till the temple organic farmland. Calves are not separated from their mothers. Milk is never extracted past the calf's natural weaning. This is expensive, labour-intensive and philosophically radical — but has made the Manor a pilgrimage site for animal-rights advocates, vegan activists, and traditional agricultural scholars as well as Hindu devotees.