Trouble at home? FFT recalls the house George Best built

George Best was football’s first pop star, but still lived with his landlady. Some shiny new digs were supposed to represent the Fifth Beatle turning over a new leaf, but it became a nightmare

George Best’s dream-home brief to architect Frazer Crane in 1969 was simple enough. “I would like a house built around two major features,” he explained. “A huge sunken bath and full-size snooker table.” Best, 23 that May, should have been approaching the peak of his Manchester United powers. Awarded the Ballon d’or six months earlier, the world was at his feet. The game’s first modern superstar, the ’60s zeitgeist, a man the Daily Mail said could “sell stair rods in a bungalow”.

But Best wanted to spread his wings. His home since pitching up at United as a scrawny teenager in 1961 had been the cosy cul-de-sac confines of Aycliffe Avenue, Chorlton-cum-hardy.

The morning cuppa and wakey-wakey tickle on the nose from long-suffering host Mary Fullaway, while suggestive of a sweetness and innocence that played well for the public eye, didn’t reflect the complex, tangled life he now led away from the pitch.

As Britain’s most eligible bachelor with a licence to print money, Best was so in demand that the Fullaways’ son Steve – handily of similar build to Best – would regularly leave the house in one of two taxis booked 10 minutes apart to create a diversion. Evidently that Beatles-esque existence couldn’t continue.

George’s des res signified a bright new dawn – a sign of his man-of-the-world maturity. He was, he declared, ready to settle down. “I won’t have to keep going out,” he smiled, “because I’m going to have somewhere to stay in.”

This was a statement to showcase the trappings of his wealth and taste – the boy from Belfast who’d hit the big time. And, above all, chez Best offered privacy. His own place, a haven from prying eyes.

That was the theory. By January 1972, within 18 months of moving in, Best was back at Mrs Fullaway’s at the behest of United, who’d dropped their increasingly errant star for missing a week’s training. By May, he’d announced his retirement and fled to Spain.

Post-matt Busby United were heading off course so swiftly they turned to their legendary former manager to steady the ship, but even the Scot couldn’t stop the walls of Best’s brave new world from closing in. The playground/castle he’d envisaged was instead an open prison, a comic metaphor for a downward spiral so dispiriting, it’s easy to imagine it as an episode of Black Mirror. Notwithstanding that Best’s gaff, Che Sera – so-named in a News of the World competition – later inspired John Cooper Clarke’s 1982 indie hit The Day My Pad Went Mad.

Crane was the architectural intellect behind Manchester’s modernist ‘Village’ development, and ‘The Carnaby Street of the north’ was the home of Edwardia, a boutique that Best co-owned with his friend Mike Summerbee [see FFT 267]. With the briefest of briefs, an especially gauche Best purchased a half-acre plot 10 miles south of Manchester, in leafy Bramhall, and gave Crane the go-ahead to build. Best’s close ally and long-term confidant, Malcolm Wagner, counselled caution and suggested buying adjacent townhouses in Salford instead.

But Best wouldn’t be swayed. He had pictured himself gazing over the hazy Pennines peaks that framed the horizon. Crane seductively promised to “interpret Best’s performance in the house’s style” – words which would carry a grim irony.

The house cost £36,000 – seven times the average at the time. It was a year in the making, its split-levels linked by an open spiral staircase with “Sicilian white marbled treads” according to a Homes and Garden picture special. Flat-roofed, built in brick and white tiles, with a bar running the full length of the L-shaped dining room and one-way glass within its 40ft floor-to-ceiling windows, it was the last word in spartan chic.

In July 1970 George moved in. He had his huge sunken bath. At 8ft x 6ft, it was big enough to wash United’s first team. That was providing he could get it filled. Problems with the water pressure meant it took 90 minutes to muster two inches over its mosaic tiles. He had his snooker table, too, although due to a measuring miscalculation there wasn’t room to use a standard cue at the baulk end.

Then there were the electrics. Che Sera screamed sleek and futuristic. Even the curtains were remote controlled. One of the highlights, a 25in colour television – space-age in an era when most people didn’t have a telephone – was concealed in a chimney breast. Descending at the push of a button – the sleight-of-hand reveal was perhaps the interpretive nod to Best’s performance that Crane had intimated. All well and good, you might think. Except the TV – and garage doors – had a mind of their own. Planes bound for Manchester Airport often scrambled the remote signals, leaving a powerless Best watching the garage doors opening and closing like a gaping mouth and the TV playing hide and seek.

That’s when he wasn’t giving himself electric shocks off the door handles, due to the nylon-based carpets.

Best’s own vision, if he’d entertained one seriously at all – was to renovate an old country house. Crane believed Best – as the essence of modernity himself – needed modern, “custom-built, state of the art and statement-making”.

The statement it made to many, given the building’s white-tiled front, appeared to be ‘public toilet’. Now experiencing the flipside of fame out and about, Best had become a target – fair game in the tall poppy stakes. Che Sera even caught the eye of The Times, who paused from their blanket coverage of establishment affairs to catalogue the story over half a page. The Daily Express splashed out on a housewarming party in exchange for picture rights of Best and guests that included Miss United Kingdom.

Soon, day trippers and rubberneckers were heading out to see the ‘super loo’, or ‘George Best’s convenience’ as it was dubbed. Visitors arrived in their droves, pulling up clumps of the pristine lawn to take home after picnicking on it. The fish in Best’s pond were similarly filched. “I started with a couple of hundred and ended up with three or four,” he mused.

The less-inhibited pressed their noses against the one-way glass. Behind it was Best, unseen yes, but in his own words, “some sort of specimen in a glass case.” Before long, he was staying away until dark. During the day he was often reliant on a police escort to escape the place.

“It got so [bad] I wouldn’t answer the phone,” said Best. “When the doorbell rang, I used to pretend I wasn’t in.”

Far from the homely retreat he’d once pictured, jotting down ‘sunken bath’ and ‘snooker table’, Che Sera was an advert for his otherness – a message from the future with its fancy gadgets.

“It seems to have spooked even him,” wrote Gordon Burn in Best and Edwards.

“It was a design driven by the idea of bringing the outside in, when what he wanted was to keep the outside at bay. The world was already too much with him without waking up to find it peering into his kitchen, bedroom and toilet.”

Best’s interview sparring partner and pal Michael Parkinson went further, and foresaw dark nights of the soul ahead.

“No episode in his life so illustrates the predicament he was in,” revealed Parky. “From the moment he went there began his rapid descent downhill.”

In January 1974 – two years after he flogged Che Sera, calling it a ‘disaster’ – Best departed his spiritual home of Old Trafford for the last time. He was 27, the future his to see. And it didn’t look good.

“IT WAS A DESIGN DRIVEN BY THE IDEA OF BRINGING THE OUTSIDE IN, WHEN BEST WANTED TO KEEP THE OUTSIDE AT BAY”