Behind a pair of white gates in Weybridge, Surrey, there are 429 houses that are home to so many of the UK’s – and the world’s – rich and famous people that the estate has been dubbed ‘Britain’s Beverly Hills’.
Welcome to St George’s Hill, a 964-acre private estate created in 1911 as an idealised country retreat for London professionals that has now become so expensive that few of today’s bankers, accountants and lawyers could afford the average £6.9 million price tag.
Over the years ‘the Hill’, as the estate is referred to by everyone interviewed for this article, has been home to John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Sir Cliff Richard, Tom Jones, Dragons’ Den star Theo Paphitis, England 1966 hero Sir Geoff Hurst, Formula One’s Jenson Button and tennis’s Sue Barker. Mixed in with the celebrities are FTSE 100 chief executives, billionaires, oligarchs and members of overseas royalty.
Some local people who live on the other side of the gates in the well-heeled town of Weybridge say that in previous decades it was possible to wander into the estate and enjoy picnics among the rhododendrons and ancient pine trees.
These days, however, the gates open only for residents using automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras or those granted a white credit-card-sized fob. All visitors have to be registered in advance and are often accompanied – or not very discreetly tailed – by security guards in white vans embossed with the estate’s green logo of St George slaying the dragon. Anyone else trying to get through is challenged – and turned away – by a team of more than a dozen security guards working 24/7.
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Luckily, when Spear’s visits on a crisp February morning, the guards immediately recognise our host, estate agent Andrew Grant, and wave us through the gates. Grant, a partner at local estate agent Curchods, has been working on the Hill since 1987 and for the past decade has been dedicated solely to buying and selling houses on the estate, leading his boss to dub him the ‘King of St George’s Hill’.
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‘I’ve sold well over 300 houses up here,’ he says. ‘I know the history of pretty much every house, and there are not many owners I don’t know. I might not have met them all personally, but I know of them and who they are.’
He’s even sold some houses several times over – including Lennon’s former house, Kenwood. ‘When I first sold it in the 1990s the gate was still covered in graffiti left by adoring fans,’ Grant says as he drives past the entrance in his Land Rover with the heated seats turned up to a toasty maximum.
Kenwood, a sprawling six-bedroom mock Tudor mansion that Lennon bought for £20,000 in 1964, has been extensively redeveloped and now boasts an indoor swimming and sauna complex at the bottom of the 1.5-acre garden. It was on the market for £9 million in 2020.
‘It’s the security, the privacy, natural beauty and the space on the estate that attracted celebrities then and still does today,’ Grant says. ‘I can always tell whether someone is going to be a Hill person or not when they pass through the gates and are like, “Wow! The space.”’
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A couple of minutes later we arrive outside Starr’s former house, Sunny Heights. Here the gates are chained shut and covered in creepers. The house – like several others in the estate – appears to have been left abandoned for years.
Grant is reluctant to talk about why the £5 million house, since renamed Summer Haze, has been left to decay, saying only that the owner died. In fact, the house has been subject to a sensational High Court probate battle that included claims that its former Russian oligarch owner was murdered on the orders of Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Scherbakov, who owned Summer Haze and another £12 million mansion on the Hill called Granville House, fled the UK for Belgium in 2016. He was seeking to avoid the threat of extradition to Russia over charges filed against him by Andrey Lugovoy, the former Russian security services agent found by the European Court of Human Rights to have murdered Alexander Litvinenko.
The following year, Scherbakov was found hanged at his home in Belgium, wearing only his underwear. His older children, who were fighting his girlfriend over inheritance rights to his £100 million fortune, told the court: ‘We believe our father was murdered.’ A judge later ruled in favour of his girlfriend, Brigita Morina, awarding her the bulk of the fortune.
‘Unrivalled’ quality
Scherbakov was among dozens of wealthy people from Russia and former Soviet states who moved into St George’s Hill following the 2008 introduction of the ‘golden visa’ scheme that allowed wealthy people to enter the UK if they invested at least £2 million.
The influx (at one point almost a quarter of all the homes in the estate had Russian or Soviet-linked ownership) led to a surge in prices. The average house price on the Hill tripled from just under £2 million in 2000 to £6 million in 2008, according to data from Savills, which tracks every property transaction in the enclave. Prices remained steady for a decade, then dipped to £4 million in 2018, before quickly recovering and hitting a record high of £6.9 million last year.
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One of the cheaper property on the market as Spear’s goes to press is a £6.8 million six-bedroom, 13,972 sq ft new build on the less popular Camp End Road. An empty 2.1- acre plot on Golf Club Road – in the heart of the estate with views of the fairways – will set you back £7.5 million.
Five mansions are on offer for more than £10 million, with Grant’s most valuable instruction, Knockdara, topping the list at £25 million. The 21,804 sq ft six- bedroom, seven-bathroom ‘ambassadorial’ home comes complete with an underground pool, spa, gym, cinema room, two temperature-controlled wine cellars (one for red and another for white), and ‘two self-contained staff apartments’.
‘The quality is unrivalled,’ Grant says of Knockdara, which also boasts a pair of curved marble staircases and two lifts. ‘It feels like a five-, six- or seven-star hotel.’ The house has been on the market since June 2024, but Grant reckons it will find a buyer before the summer.
Trevor Kearney, founder of luxury estate agent The Private Office: Real Estate, says the appeal of St George’s Hill is ‘having that feeling that you’re in the countryside while you’re within touching distance of London and Heathrow’.
‘Try finding this much green space anywhere else,’ says Kearney, who posts on Instagram as @superprimesurrey. ‘It’s positively underdeveloped and the planning policy means the green space will never change – it will never become more densely populated.’
About half of the buyers today are British, with a growing number of Americans expressing interest as the dollar continues to strengthen against the pound.
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‘It’s really very cosmopolitan,’ Grant says. ‘There are people from all around the world, a lot of European families, and Chinese, as well as a growing number from Dubai and places in Africa.’
Super-prime buyers
Some of the owners have inherited family fortunes, while others are self-made multimillionaires, including two recent recipients of the Spear’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award: Paul Taylor, the Northern Irish founder and chief executive of banking technology company Thought Machine, and Strive Masiyiwa, the Zimbabwe-born founder of international technology companies Econet Global and Cassava Technologies.
‘There is this perception that it is all billionaires, but it is a real mix of people,’ Grant says.
‘Some are down-to-earth families who drive themselves and take the train to London [it’s 28 minutes on the train from Weybridge to Waterloo], whilst others have drivers and personal security details.’ There are similarities among residents too, however. Analysis of Land Registry data obtained by Private Eye a few years ago shows that of all the homes on the Hill sold between 2005 and 2014, at least 72 were registered in tax havens.
The St George’s Hill estate was created by entrepreneur and property developer Walter George Tarrant, who bought the site from the Egerton family. Before the Egertons – who held the title of the Earls of Ellesmere – the land had been owned by the ‘Grand Old’ Duke of York.
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Tarrant promised in his prospectus: ‘No expense has been, or will be, spared to make the Estate the most desirable place of residence within easy reach of London… St George’s Hill has long been celebrated as one of the principal beauty spots of Surrey. It is claimed for the St George’s Hill Estate that in point of situation, accessibility to town, beauty, health, and facilities for sport of every kind, it stands absolutely without a rival.’
His plans, however, immediately proved controversial, with The Spectator warning in December 1911: ‘It was inevitable, no doubt, that St George’s Hill should be sold sooner or later, and those who regret it most will be the first to appreciate the liberality and kindliness which for so many years have given free access to walks among pines and rhododendrons.’
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Tarrant’s first project was to chop down hundreds of the ancient Scots pine trees to create the fairways of St George’s Hill Golf Club. The course, which consists of three loops of nine holes (the blue, the red and the green), is often ranked by golf magazines as among the best and most picturesque in the world.
Joining the Hill
It’s no easy task to join the club – or even find out how much it might cost. A membership secretary says the first task is to get three current members to nominate you. ‘Then you’ll need six letters of support from members, including at least two serving or former captains,’ she says. ‘Then you can meet the captain and manager and begin discussions to join the waiting list and play test rounds with the pro.’
The waiting list is closed, and she warns that it will be at least a five-year wait if and when it opens. Information on fees, she says, is only provided to applicants who prove they are committed to the process. Visiting players, who are only allowed to play on Mondays-Thursdays in the summer, are charged green fees of £285 for 18 holes. (They’re encouraged to play with an existing member, but do not have to.)
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With the golf course under way, Tarrant started building large detached family homes, each set within at least one acre of land to ensure the privacy and seclusion for each house and maintain the overall feel of countryside tranquillity in the estate. The minimum of one acre of grounds per property rule remains in force to this day, and was incorporated into the statute book in the 1990 St George’s Hill, Weybridge, Estate Act – making it one of the country’s most unusual laws.
Tarrant’s work creating the Hill was chronicled by Mavis Swenarton, a pharmacist who moved into a Tarrant-built house on the estate with her husband and young children in 1955. After her student son, Mark, wrote a paper about the estate as part of his degree, Mavis became intrigued and devoted much of her retirement to researching Tarrant and the estate.
‘She was interested in his vision and how St George’s Hill had changed over time,’ recalls Mark, who is now emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Liverpool. ‘When we lived there a lot of the original Tarrant mansions had been divided up into three, so to buy one of those you didn’t have to be a billionaire, you just had to have some money. It started to change in the Sixties when the pop stars moved in and even wealthier people followed.
‘Mavis was the first – and as far as I know is still the only – person to document the development of the estate and the houses built on it using primary archival sources, so her book, The History of St George’s Hill, and her other writings on Tarrant are still the standard works of reference.’
In her work, Mavis describes Tarrant as ‘a man of impressive appearance, over six feet tall and said to resemble King Edward VII with his beard and fondness for wearing leather gaiters and knickerbockers’. She also suggests he lost his left eye in a golf accident, and would only allow his photograph to be taken in right-side profiles.
Portraits of Tarrant hanging at St George’s Hill Lawn Tennis Club are all side profiles. The tennis club, which was opened by minor royal Prince Alexander of Teck in 1913, immediately became the social hub of the community and remains so today.
‘This is where people come to meet each other, and relax, particularly younger families,’ Grant says over £14.50 chicken and bacon club sandwiches and flat whites in the Club Room. ‘They put on loads of activities – there’s a summer ball and a winter ball. Some people spend their whole lives at the club.’
Grant is a member himself (you don’t have to live on the estate in order to join), and within 30 minutes he bumps into three people he’s sold houses to. Sadly, none of them are prepared to talk to a journalist about life on the Hill.
Simon Ashwell, the regional director of Savills and a friendly rival of Grant’s, is also a member and provides a second guided tour of the estate. ‘This one was £18 million, sold to a British guy,’ he says as we zip past so fast in his new Porsche that it’s hard to note down the house names. ‘This was sold to a Chinese family for £23 million…
A Cambodian family bought that for just under £13 million.’ Among the other owners he lists are the CEOs of two FTSE 100 companies, a heart surgeon, a partner at a well-known private equity firm and an airline pilot.
A very private club
While the US has hundreds of exclusive gated communities, there are only a handful in the UK, including the nearby Wentworth Estate in Virginia Water, the Crown Estate in Oxshott and Burwood Park in Walton on Thames.
The estate agents say St George’s Hill stands out for its history, grandeur of houses and the level of service provided by the St George’s Hill Residents Association (SGHRA), including round-the-clock security guards, gardeners, tree surgeons and a snow plough to keep the roads clear in winter. Household waste and recycling is collected by Elmbridge Borough Council, but the residents’ association charges a fee for every lorry load of builders’ rubble removed from the site.
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The SGHRA declined to comment on the annual service charge that residents pay, but Ashwell says it starts at about £3,500 for the smallest houses on the estate and rises in line with property’s size. ‘It’s pretty reasonable when you compare it to the service charge of some central London apartments,’ Ashwell says. Residents of the penthouse apartments in the One Hyde Park development in Knightsbridge are charged more than £160,000 a year.
Residents of the Hill prize their privacy highly, but the estate hit the headlines in 2012 when multimillionaire Russian businessman Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed and died while out jogging near the £5 million house on Granville Road that he was renting for £12,500 a month.
His death came soon after he blew the whistle on a complex $230 million fraud carried out by a Russian gang with alleged links to the Kremlin. A coroner ruled in 2018 that Perepilichnyy had died of natural causes, although he could not ‘completely eliminate all possibility’ that he was the victim of foul play.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the UK government’s imposition of sanctions on high-profile Russians, thrust the Hill back into the spotlight in 2022. Among those added to the sanctions list was billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska, whom the government described as a ‘pro-Kremlin oligarch… closely associated with the government of Russia and Vladimir Putin’.
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In 2001 he bought one of the grandest homes on the Hill: the grade-II-listed Hamstone House. When the sanctions were announced, it was on the market for £18 million, leading Knight Frank to pull the listing.
Deripaska claims he is not the owner of the house, from which Winston Churchill planned the D-Day landings in 1944. Property records show it is owned by Cyprus-based Edenfield Investments Ltd, which in 2018 was transferred to Deripaska’s ex-wife, Polina Yumasheva – the step-granddaughter of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin.
Eugene Tenenbaum, Roman Abramovich’s right-hand man and former director of Chelsea FC, was given government permission to sell his St George’s Hill mansion, Park Hill, for £16 million in May 2022 – just a month after being placed on the sanctions list. Lawyers for Tenenbaum said his proceeds from the sale ‘were frozen on completion of the transaction in accordance with the sanctions regime’.
After the tightly controlled tours with the estate agents, I hoped to strike up conversation with residents walking through the gates. But in more than an hour of waiting – while many expensive cars with blackout back windows sped past – only one pedestrian walked by. Paula, who preferred not to provide her surname, was walking back from the Waitrose on Weybridge High Street to her friends’ house on the estate.
‘I’ve been staying with my friends here for a month a year for more than 20 years, and I’ve never met a single neighbour, and I’m not sure they have either,’ she says. ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really pleasant place to live and the security is very high, but for me it is not a real community.’
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 95. Click here to subscribe
