Wayne Manor is the ancestral home and main residence of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. It is one of many well-known locations in the DC Comics universe.
The residence is typically depicted as a large mansion, often in a late Victorian style, on the outskirts of Gotham City and is maintained by the Wayne family's butler, Alfred Pennyworth. While the earliest stories showed Bruce Wayne buying the house himself, by the 1950s at the latest, retroactive continuity had established that the manor had belonged to the Wayne family for several generations. Along with serving as a personal residence, the mansion houses the Batcave, which Batman uses as his secret headquarters. The vast majority of DC Comics references place Wayne Manor just outside of Gotham City in the state of New Jersey.
In the 1960s television series, the mansion was without exception referred to as "stately Wayne Manor". For live-action films, English country house locations in Nottinghamshire, Hertfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, as well as Stevenson Taylor Hall in New York, have been used to depict Wayne Manor.
Access to the Batcave[]
The manor grounds include an extensive subterranean cave system that Bruce Wayne discovered as a boy and later used as his base of operations, the Batcave. The method used to access it has varied across the different storylines in the comics, movies, and shows. In the comic books, it is typically accessible from a hidden door in Wayne Manor's study behind a non-functioning grandfather clock, which opens to a descending staircase when the hands on said clock are turned to 10:47, the time Thomas and Martha Wayne were killed.
The grounds also includes a large hill that was partially hollowed out for Batman's aerial vehicles, and there is also an underground river system that is large enough to accommodate docking space for the Batboat and has a large opening for said vehicle.
The Wayne Foundation Penthouse era[]
While these grounds are the regular home of Bruce Wayne, he temporarily vacated it in the stories from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, preferring to live in a penthouse apartment on top of the Wayne Foundation building in the city, which also included a secret sub-basement acting as a Batcave.
Wayne came to this decision when Dick Grayson went off to college, which led him to decide that the mansion was now impractical with only one resident and one servant. Furthermore, Wayne decided he wanted to be closer to his main field of operations in Gotham City than a home situated outside the main urban area would allow. However, by the early 1980s, Wayne came to reconsider that purpose and decided being somewhat less accessible to the public was more advantageous for his Batman activities after all and returned to Wayne Manor.