Property

The faded splendour of 1980s Margate is the backdrop for Sam Mendes’s new film Empire of Light, starring Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. Coming to UK cinemas on 9 January, it’s about a romance in the north Kent seaside town and the revival of a striking 1930s cinema with a distinctive brick ‘fin’ tower. Renamed briefly as the Empire Cinema during filming in the spring, Margate’s Grade II-listed Dreamland Cinema takes a starring role. In reality it’s part of the Dreamland amusement park complex that’s had 102 years of rollercoaster fortunes. The park underwent a £25 million makeover in 2017, and its relaunch contributed to the reinvention of Margate into

Of all the money we’ve spent on our barn conversion since we moved in 13 years ago, the wood-burner we installed in our living room trumps bathrooms, oak flooring and even a beautiful garden room extension as our best investment. At £2,000, the neat cast-iron stove was worth every penny – and never more so than now, when the temperature is plummeting and our smart meter informs us that we’re blowing a zillion pounds a day on gas and electricity despite being frugal with the heating and, well, everything else.  Log-burners weren’t such a common sight when we got ours in 2012, but since then they’ve grown in popularity among

It’s famed for cider, cheese and Glastonbury, but there’s much more to love about Somerset.  Alongside a popular private members’ club (Babington House) and a global gallery outfit (Hauser & Wirth), its most in-vogue country house hotel (The Newt) has helped to attract a steady stream of creative emigres. Among those embracing the county’s way of life are internationally known designers such as Alice Temperley and Bill Amberg and landscape gardeners such as Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt, whose rewilding garden won best in show at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show (which happened to be sponsored by The Newt). But from Frome via Bruton and Ilminster west to Chard

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful life experiences, right up there with bereavement and divorce. But what about the stress of not moving? Amid the upheavals of the past few months increasing numbers have seen their property ladder dreams collapse around their ears. According to market analyst TwentyCi there has been a ‘sharp increase’ in the number of deals falling through. More than 90,000 agreed sales disintegrated between July and September, an 18 per cent increase on the same period in 2019. Wendy and William Waterton know exactly what it feels like to be on the sharp end of a collapsing sale. In the past

When the Prince and Princess of Wales announced they were moving their family to the Royal County of Berkshire this summer, estate agents reported a ‘flurry’ of enquiries about properties around Windsor and the village of Bucklebury, 50 minutes west on the M4. The Middleton family had already been increasing their interests in and around Bucklebury, where they have lived since Kate was young. James Middleton and his French wife, Alizée, own a farmhouse there, and Pippa Middleton’s husband, James Matthews, has acquired Bucklebury Farm Park. Pippa and her husband also bought a £15 million mansion nearby this year. And where royals and their relatives lead, it seems others follow.

The 34 early Georgian houses that line Fournier Street, in the heart of Spitalfields, are a perfectly preserved microcosm of East London life through the centuries. Since it was built in the 1720s, the street – which runs between Brick Lane and Commercial Street, in E1 – has variously been home to the city’s wealthiest and poorest. With many of its first residents Huguenot weavers escaping religious persecution in France, the street is characterised by its series of highly glazed lofts, harnessing the light vital for the skilled textile work, with many of the houses subsequently bought by those in the silk trade. Arguably one of the finest houses on the

Mixing business with pleasure can be risky business. For decades the City of London has upheld this doctrine, religiously prioritising office space over new homes to preserve its reputation as a global financial centre. In his 29-year tenure as the City of London’s planning chief, Peter Rees famously allowed only one new residential tower to be built in the Square Mile: The Heron, a 285-apartment building which was completed in 2013. But the aftershocks of the pandemic – recent data suggests that the number of workers at their desks in the Square Mile’s offices is down by around a third; office vacancy rates stand at almost 10 per cent –

The British middle-classes are a predictable breed. We love nothing more than to take goods that were once prudent and pragmatic and give them a luxury edge. From the Mini Cooper, first marketed as an affordable car for the masses, to Land Rover Defenders that we have no intention of spoiling with mud, we like our creature comforts to be rooted in a make-do-and-mend mindset, even if they have long outgrown their original purpose. It’s little wonder, then, that the British have been so quick to embrace wood-burners. Because what embodies that no-nonsense, post-war mentality better than huddling around the hearth to keep warm or stacking logs into a shed

From the man down the pub/on Twitter to major lenders and think-tanks, homebuyers and sellers can barely move for so-called experts dishing out advice on the property market. Rising interest rates and increased mortgage costs have prompted fears of a house price slump, with Capital Economics predicting a 5 per cent drop over the next two years. Credit Suisse is forecasting that prices could fall by as much as 15 per cent if interest rates hit 6 per cent – making it more of crash than slowdown. Buyers don’t want to make a major purchase at the top of the market, and sellers may be hesitant to list if they

When Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s hapless roving emissary, descended on London in 1936 with orders to negotiate an Anglo-German alliance, one of his first ports of call was the elegant mansion just off Hyde Park owned by Sir Roderick Jones, chairman of the Reuters news agency, and his wife Enid Bagnold, the writer of National Velvet. Wangling an invitation to dinner was a surprisingly astute move – the parties at 29 Hyde Park Gate were legendary, usually attracting a gilded mix of aristocrats, politicians, journalists and writers, such as H.G. Wells and Vita Sackville-West – and Ribbentrop had convinced himself that by schmoozing luminaries he could persuade Britain to side

At its peak, Battersea Power Station supplied a fifth of London’s electricity, including to Buckingham Palace and parliament. Today, the most electric thing about it is the virtual reality gaming venue on site. Times have changed – but the reopening of the power station allows us to rediscover one of our finest pieces of industrial heritage and to take stock of the neighbourhood’s £9 billion makeover. The iconic Grade II*-listed building was decommissioned and shut down in 1983. Over the past ten years, in Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, it has been restored and repurposed. The project reaches its climax today when the power station reopens as a residential, retail

It has been almost a decade since the first apartments at Battersea Power Station went on sale. Such was the excitement about its redevelopment that buyers queued in the chilly dawn for the chance to pick up a £343,000 studio flat or a £6 million penthouse. Most were from overseas, and in four days in January 2013 they collectively spent £600 million. These kinds of scenes are something London’s housebuilders and estate agents can today only dream of. Although we have moved on from worst ravages of the pandemic, and traveller numbers are very much in recovery, many foreign property buyers – for years the mainstay of prime London’s property

Where do you stand on new houses? You know, the little red boxes you see massed along the sides of motorways or clustered on what used to be flood plains? They’re hateful, aren’t they? Now, I know many people (my mother included) who own perfectly lovely new houses – and these houses are indeed all very lovely, and I bow to their pragmatism in putting basic necessities such as effective heating and draught-free corridors above the concerns of taste or aesthetics. But I can’t do it. Whether it’s down to the fact that the windows are a funny shape and as impossible to open as those on an Airbus, or

Have we reached peak Cotswolds? Not if the queues outside Diddly Squat Farm Shop near the village of Charlbury are anything to go by. Locals bemoan the traffic jams around Jeremy Clarkson’s estate as fans flock from far and wide to take home a bottle of the ‘cow juice’ from the Clarkson’s Farm TV series. Clarkson’s tongue-in-cheek product is a wry nod to the area’s reputation for rural chic, forged by the likes of Lady Bamford’s Daylesford Organic farm shop – where a scented candle will set you back £49 – and Nick Jones’s Soho Farmhouse, where a stay in a luxury ‘piglet house’ costs £395 a night. These luxury brands

Having written recently about how Prime Central London is enjoying a time in the sun after almost a decade in the doldrums, buying a property there just got even more tempting – if, that is, you’re spending dollars. And 66 countries worldwide are linked to the currency and affected by fluctuations in its value. A property in Kensington and Chelsea will now cost dollar-based buyers two-thirds of what it would have cost them in 2014 Over more than four decades it’s been clear that the fortunes of PCL are affected more by geopolitical events and exchange rates than by domestic interest rates. Any global ‘black swan’ event – such as

In a wide clearing in woodland in a county of southern England that shall remain unnamed, a very unusual property is being built from brick and wood. When complete in a couple of years’ time, a lost rambler who stumbles across it may think he has found an old country house dating from the early 18th century, perhaps even the late 17th. With its classical proportions and time-honoured elegance, the building could be mistaken for an unadvertised outpost of the National Trust, the ancestral home of minor gentry, or even the setting for Bridgerton or some other regency drama. Yet this will be a thoroughly modern home, albeit one that embraces certain

If you’re looking for a bellwether for the world economy, you could do worse than consider what’s happening at the very highest end of London’s property market. Over several decades, Prime Central London – or PCL – had become a repository for cash from wealthy foreigners, whether they actually wanted to live there or not. This had several side effects – namely that PCL became mostly lined with empty properties and prices went into ‘trophy’ mode. This is a world controlled by a cabal of high-end agents operating completely off the grid Then Brexit appeared on the horizon, and for some time rich international buyers avoided London out of fear

A short train journey from London, in the outer reaches of suburbia in Kent, sits the house that saved the world. Or rather: it’s the house that saved the man who saved the world. The property in question, of course, is Chartwell, which 100 years ago this month was bought by a certain Winston Churchill, then a Liberal MP. Back then his career was in ascendance: in 1924, with Churchill having crossed the floor, Stanley Baldwin made him Chancellor, a post he retained until 1929. But then, rather suddenly, he was out in the cold. That was when Chartwell – and the 81 acres it sits in – came to

When I lived in north London as a postgraduate student, my flatmates amused themselves by shouting abusive names at the then member for Henley as he cycled past on his way to the Commons from his house in Islington. But judging by the reaction from my old neighbours in Herne Hill, Boris Johnson is likely to receive an even less affable greeting there. The erstwhile prime minister and his wife have reportedly bought a five-bedroom home in Herne Hill, the leafy liberal, left-leaning pocket of south-east London where I lived for almost 20 years before moving to Norfolk last summer. Since news of their move to SE24 became public, the neighbourhood