A man has been charged with causing almost £2m. worth of fire damage to Oxfordshire property including a massive blaze which ripped through a village mansion.

The man, in his early thirties, is accused of starting a fire which caused damage estimated at £1.2m to the mock-tudor mansion in Lady Place, Sutton Courtenay, near Abingdon, in the early hours of Saturday.

He has also been charged with starting an earlier blaze on July 25, which caused £750,000 damage to a stable block at Wheatfield, near Thame, and setting fire to a car in Sutton Courtenay's High Street on Saturday morning.

He is currently in police custody and was due to appear before Oxford Magistrates Court today. Meanwhile, John and Charlotte Storrs and their sons Nicholas and Mike, who were the last remaining tenants in the mansion, have been counting the cost of the damage after losing thousands of pounds worth of furniture and property.

The building is owned by Reading University, which had plans to redevelop the site.

The family had arrived home in the early hours of Saturday morning after attending a relative's wedding to find their front door had been broken open and flames had spread throughout.

The couple's daughter Lucy, 30, who was with them at the time, said: "We came back at 1am to find the whole of the front of the house ablaze.

" We sat on the lawn in a state of disbelief. They've lost all their videos of kids, all their clothes, all their books. Thank God they weren't inside.

"There was no way of knowing they weren't inside."

Mr Storrs, a harpsichord maker and software consultant and his wife, who is a violin teacher, had been renovating a house in Culham, which they intended to move into.

Lucy revealed there had been other problems, including stones being thrown at the house and gate posts being stolen over the last two months.

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