Property

July 8, 2026

The secret life of London’s Billionaires’ Row

The story of London’s billionaires’ row is one of contrasts: a home to royals and oligarchs; grand mansions and derelict wrecks. Now, as a swarm of property developers descends, what does its next chapter hold?

By Rupert Neate

Trevor Abrahmsohn is north London’s veteran high-end estate agent ne plus ultra, a dealmaker for billionaires, foreign royals, footballers and oligarchs (back when that was allowed). His whitegrey bouffant flutters in the wind as he drives me down The Bishops Avenue in his soft-top sportscar, telling anecdotes about the properties and personalities of this storied street, which has long been known as the capital’s billionaires’ row.

Abrahmsohn, 71, a self-described ‘cheeky chappy’, has been selling houses on The Bishops Avenue since 1976. Over that time he has watched it – and helped it – graduate from the ‘millionaires’ row’ moniker it attracted in the 1930s to ‘billionaires’ row’ in the 1990s and 2000s when some of the world’s wealthiest people built grand 20,000 sq ft mansions that changed hands for tens of millions of pounds.

But several of those once-palatial homes were left empty or allowed to fall into a state of disrepair. Some were even given over to nature as ferns and creepers grew over their marble staircases and mosaic-lined indoor swimming pools.

Now the The Bishops Avenue is entering yet another transition as some of those unloved structures have been bulldozed to make way for a new generation of luxury apartments – as well as one or two old people’s homes.

‘If you go back to the beginning, it was big mansions built for the captains of industry, film stars and the gentry,’ Abrahmsohn says before reeling off a list of past and present owners I suspect he has learned by heart over the years.

There’s Gracie Fields, the music hall singer and film star; holiday camp entrepreneur Billy Butlin; Constantine II, the last king of Greece; the Sultan of Brunei; author of The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie; former Express newspapers owner Richard Desmond; steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal; and Jaweed al-Ghussein, Palestinian businessman and philanthropist.

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‘This was built for William Park Lyle – the son of one of the founders of the Tate & Lyle sugar empire – in 1910 with 14 bedrooms and five acres of grounds,’ Abrahmsohn says as he pulls over in his 1967 British racing green E-Type Series I Jaguar outside Heath Hall, one of street’s largest mansions. ‘Nowadays that’s just far too big for anyone, no matter how rich you are.’

Surviving mansion Heath Hall, at 59 The Bishop’s Avenue, is Grade II listed // Image: Alamy

Heath Hall (number 59) went on to become used as ‘an accommodation block for up to 50 London employees of the Bank of China’, before falling into disrepair (an all too familiar story up and down the famous street), and was bought by property developer Andreas Panayiotou for just £5 million in 2006. He pumped in millions refurbishing the property before listing it for a then record-setting £100 million in 2011.

It failed to sell. The price was repeatedly cut until it was bought by Czech billionaire and Royal Mail owner Daniel Křetínský for £25 million in 2015.

It is unclear if Křetínský ever moved in, but the property was rented to Justin Bieber for £27,000 a week in October 2016 when the pop star was in town performing his Purpose album world tour. François-Henri Pinault, president of luxury group Kering, and his wife, the actress Salma Hayek, also rented Heath Hall in November 2017.

Many of the largest houses on the street – which began to be built in 1894 on the Bishop of London’s former hunting grounds – had been here at the southern tip of the road, at the top of the hill and closest to stately home Kenwood House and Hampstead Heath.

But now several of those mansions have been torn down and Heath Hall is surrounded by new-build apartment blocks, care homes and building sites paving the way for more new-builds.

‘It’s changing with the times,’ Abrahmsohn says of the road. ‘It always has. London, and this street in particular, has been the place where rich people bought property when there was trouble in the world.’

Wealthy Iranians came after the 1979 revolution, the Saudi royal family bought several properties here before the first Gulf War and the Russians arrived in big numbers in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the privatisation of the region’s oil and gas industries – and again after the 2008 financial crisis and the introduction of the ‘golden visa’ scheme that effectively allowed rich people to buy the right to live in the UK.

In more recent times Chinese billionaires had been keen to get a slice of London’s billionaires’ row, but the stalling of their homeland’s economy has had a knock-on effect. The street has also had to contend with Brexit, the scrapping of the non-dom tax regime and increases in stamp duty.

‘Now, rather than whole big houses that they have to manage and look after, people are looking for exceptional quality apartments with superb communal facilities,’ Abrahmsohn explains.

First there was Buxmead, a gated development of 20 apartments costing as much as £23.95 million for the 9,321 sq ft penthouses. The complex, which backs on to Highgate School’s playing fields, is – Abrahmsohn claims – home to several Premier League footballers. It was also the London bolthole for Ariana Grande while she was filming Wicked in 2022.

The Buxmead 20-apartment development was completed in 2016 // Image: Maison

Soon Buxmead, at number 67, will have a fresh challenger for its status as The Bishops’ fanciest apartment block. Builders are swarming over number 54, constructing a complex of 36 ‘five-star hotel-grade’ apartments on the site of Oak Lodge, a 1927 arts and crafts property designed by Scottish architect John Soutar, which burned down in unexplained circumstances in 2022.

It had been one of a dozen houses bought by the Saudi royal family in the late Eighties and early Nineties as luxury refuges in case Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded and they had to flee. The invasion didn’t happen and they never moved into the mansions, which were left to fall into disrepair.

The most palatial of the Saudi properties – the Towers at number 53, famous for its crumbling Grecian column and having been built on the site of Gracie Fields’ former home, also suffered a devastating fire in 2023. It is set to be replaced by a six-storey block containing 65 flats.

The Towers is to be repurposed as an apartment block // Image: Liam Heatherson

Other properties on The Bishops Avenue are reportedly owned by Mojtaba Khamenei, who became Iran’s Supreme Leader following the death of his father in March 2026.

Earlier this year reports by Bloomberg and Transparency International stated that Khamenei had used proxies to build a global property empire worth hundreds of millions of pounds, £150 million of it in London. Some £73 million of this is said to be in the form of a collection of derelict mansions on The Bishops Avenue, which is in addition to a luxury mansion on the same street, believed to have been purchased by a proxy in 2014 for £33.7 million.

‘These are not historical curiosities,’ says Ben Cowdock, senior investigations lead at Transparency International UK. ‘They represent live vulnerabilities in the UK’s defences against illicit finance. Iranian regime figures and their proxies have been able to use UK property, companies and financial institutions with apparent ease. At a time when the geopolitical stakes around Iran could not be higher, the UK government needs to act.’

Nohaad Alothmani, whom I stop as he is walking past a derelict stretch, says he welcomes the street’s new developments if not the disruption and noise caused by the construction workers.

‘I walk down this street once a week to visit a friend who lives in Kentish Town and it always depresses me a little bit seeing all the empty houses when there are so many people without homes in the world,’ says Alothmani, 55, who lives in Barnet and works for Hackney Council. ‘I think it’s fine for people to own big houses, but they should really live in them or give them up to become parks or homes for other people. They shouldn’t just be left to decay.’

There are very few pedestrians on this mile-long road with less than 100 houses, but slightly further down I bump into Maira Benthanane, a 21-year-old student from France on her way to a tutoring gig. ‘I come here twice or three times a week to teach a Chinese lady conversational English,’ she says. ‘I never really see anyone else walking here except a housekeeper who works in a mansion across the street from my client. It can be a bit spooky, I don’t like to walk here when it’s dark.’ She enjoys the work though, and the pay – £70 an hour.

By appointment, I meet Rosy Khalastchy, the head of the St John’s Wood office of upmarket estate agent Beauchamp Estates, who is attempting to challenge Abrahamsohn’s dominance of the street’s sales market.

Khalastchy says she has sold more than half a dozen properties on the street, including one for more than £30 million, but admits The Bishops Avenue has ‘lost some of its appeal’ in recent years as many of the houses are too large or too dated for today’s buyers’ tastes.

‘Some of the neighbouring streets can appeal more to buyers as the houses are of a more modest scale and the streets are more discreet and less showy than The Bishops Avenue,’ says Khalastchy, who drives a black Mini Countryman. ‘The empty and derelict houses here also have an impact on buyers as it can make you feel like you’re living in a ghost town, and prospective purchasers do raise it as a concern, so it’s good that they are getting redeveloped.’

Back with Abrahmsohn three hours later, and the seasoned salesman is still full of patter. Now it’s over roast chicken and steamed vegetables (for him), and rump steak and red wine (for me) in the Old Bull & Bush pub a short drive away.

He got the idea to become an estate agent from a friend of his dad’s while training at dental school in the Seventies. And he knew then there was only one road he wanted to concentrate on: The Bishops Avenue.

‘It’s near unique in London in offering large houses on big plots of land closeish to the centre of town,’ he says.

He had noticed that the street’s houses, which had been popular with British actors, musicians and captains of industry since the turn of the last century, were becoming sought after by the wealthy – and soon the very wealthy – from across the world.

Abrahmsohn quit dental school, set up his own estate agency, Glentree (a portmanteau of his brother Glen’s name and his own), and set about staking claim to the road. It worked.

Five decades on, Abrahmsohn and Glentree, which employs 12 people including Lauren, the eldest of his two daughters, are still synonymous with the street. He claims to have been involved in the sale of more than 90% of all the 66 houses on the street and some of them more than five times over.

Alex Michelin, founder and chief executive of Valouran, the developer of the complex replacing Oak Lodge, Bishops Avenue Gardens, says the project is helping to ‘evolve the legacy’ of The Bishops Avenue.

Luxury apartment complex Bishops Avenue Gardens has replaced Oak Lodge at number 54 // Image: Recent Spaces

‘The wealthy no longer require 11 bedrooms and a dining room that seats 20,’ he says. ‘They still want somewhere imposing and elegant, but they’re looking for minimal maintenance. They’d rather have a concierge who can arrange everything than the responsibility for a retinue of staff.’

He says the new four-building gated development will offer ‘the privacy and seclusion’ of its predecessor and also ‘a modern community, somewhere tranquil and inviting with unparalleled facilities to come together or pamper yourself’.

The facilities – which will include a fitness suite, spa and a 20m swimming pool set within 2.5 acres of landscaped grounds – come at a cost. The cheapest apartment in the complex, a two-bedroom 1,163 sq ft pied-à-terre, is on the market for £2.5 million. A three-bedroom 3,455 sq ft penthouse is listed for £8.8 million – or 2,547 per sq ft – putting it at a similar level to some of the most desirable new developments in more central postcodes.

Charles Leigh, Valouran’s sales director, says there has been ‘plenty of interest’ from prospective buyers, but the developer has so far only exchanged contracts on one flat. ‘We would have wanted to be further ahead, but considering the market, the political situation and the situation in the Middle East we are confident,’ he says.

The properties are being marketed through Abrahmsohn and Glentree.

Valouran, which recently redeveloped the former Whiteleys department store in Bayswater into luxury apartments, is working in partnership with Emirati billionaire Mahdi Al Tajir, who bought the plot for £18 million in 2018. Al Tajir mostly lives in Kier House, a more than 100-room Palladian country mansion in Perthshire, Scotland, and owns Highland Spring mineral water.

Bishops Avenue Gardens’ target market, Leigh says, is people who ‘already live in and love the area’. He expects that most buyers will be British people ‘selling out of big houses’ and looking for a smaller ‘new definition of luxury’.

The Bishops Avenue, on sale through Sotheby’s for £10.5 million // Image: Sotheby’s International Realty

The one flat that has exchanged so far has been bought by an ‘older couple who live closer to town but are looking for a half-urban, half-country lifestyle’.

He hopes the buyers will be a mix of ages, and bristles at a mention of a Times headline describing the road as having gone ‘from billionaires’ row to care home central’.

You don’t have to travel far to find out why. Next door at number 56 is Riverstone Bishops Avenue, a ‘later living’ development of 93 flats for those over 65, where the cheapest one-bedroom flat costs £1.6 million – and an additional £1,675 monthly membership fee. The three-bedroom penthouse costs £5.4m, plus a £4,555 a month fee. Riverstone is backed by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, the private equity division of the Wall Street bank.

And the next neighbour, at number 58, is luxury care home Signature at Highgate. Over flat white coffees and biscuits provided by the on-site barista, manager Karen Fleming says the 96-bed care home opened in December 2023 on the site of another long-abandoned mansion, Kenmore House.

‘A niece of a previous owner came to visit and remembered a large imposing house with a swimming pool and tennis court at the back,’ she says. ‘Now this is the flagship Signature home, and we have a cinema, a gym and a coffee shop.’

A stay at the home starts at £2,275 a week, and can rise considerably depending on the level of care required. Residents come from all across the world, but most are British and either used to live in the area or have children who live close by.

‘They are a mixture of people who were all very successful in their fields,’ Fleming adds. ‘There are retired business people, consultants, surgeons, people who own their own businesses and celebrities.’ She declines to name any of the celebrities when pressed, but says: ‘You would know of them.’

‘There are not that many care homes that cater to the luxury end of the market,’ Fleming says when asked about the home’s appeal. ‘Also the location is certainly a draw. People like to be near the park [Hampstead Heath], and we have one resident who said she had always wanted to live on The Bishops Avenue but never thought she would. Now she loves telling people her address.’

This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 100. Click here to subscribe

Rupert Neate

Rupert Neate is a freelance feature writer. Previously he spent a decade as wealth correspondent for the Guardian covering the lives of the world’s richest people and their impact on society.