Royals of suburbia – inside the new Windsor set
Their green-welly friends might sneer, but a move would make perfect sense for the Cambridges, says Anna Tyzack
Given the mass exodus of families out of London during lockdown, it’s hardly surprising that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are beginning to feel cooped up. Prince William and Catherine are rumoured to be plotting a permanent move from Kensington Palace to the provinces, relocating their three children all the way down the M4 to Windsor.
Their London circle is aghast – what’s wrong with Anmer Hall, their 10-bedroom weekend house in Norfolk? – and so, too, are their green-welly friends, who consider this corner of Berkshire as not proper countryside and horribly naff.
But the Cambridges, ever the modern family, have recognised that at their stage in life suburbia makes perfect sense. “People can be very snotty about that area west of London, but that mainly comes out of ignorance,” maintains an Eton contemporary of Prince William, who grew up on the fringes of Windsor Great Park. “It’s picturesque and also meaningfully close to town, unlike other parts of the Home Counties.”
For, as Will’s and Kate’s commuterbelt friends will be warning them, each extra second spent in transit is purgatory when you want to be home for bathtime. From work in Kensington to home in Windsor would take 45 minutes, under police escort – and as little as 25 minutes on a good day, which is not much longer than the Cambridges’s current school run to Thomas’s Battersea, the south London prep school that their two eldest children attend. If moving out west would make it possible to shift seamlessly between work and home, it would also help them keep a greater separation between these two worlds.
“It makes utter sense,” says Sue Barnes, of Lavender Green Flowers (lavendergreen.co.uk), who brought up her children in the area and does flowers for the local royals. “If you’re a working royal, what people regard as ‘real country’ is not going to fit. Here, we’re used to celebrities, there’s no fuss, and you can pull up the drawbridge. I’d say that there’s no better area for the Cambridges.” Their arrival would consolidate the Windsor Estate – which comprises 15,800 acres of ancient woodland, trails and undulating parkland, plus numerous grand residences inhabited by royals – as the family’s suburban stronghold. Undeterred by the Heathrow flight paths and motorway noise, the Yorks have been in situ at Royal Lodge, a Crown Estate property in Windsor Great Park, since 2003, and the Wessexes live at Bagshot Park, 11 miles away. At the start of the pandemic, the Queen declared Windsor Castle her primary residence, while the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were the first of the younger Royals to endorse the area in 2019, when they made Frogmore Cottage in Windsor Great Park their UK base. (It’s currently home to Princess Eugenie and her husband, Jack Brooksbank.)
Heading west has, arguably, long been on the cards for the Cambridges. In 2011, they were reportedly looking around Kingston Lisle Park, near Wantage, which used to belong to Prince Harry’s godmother, Laura Lonsdale. They fled to Anglesey instead, to enjoy being newlyweds in relative peace – but now, with three children and life only getting busier, proximity to the rest of the family is more appealing than ever.
And not just to William’s side – but also, crucially, Kate’s parents, alpha-grandparents Ca role and Michael Middleton, who remain the Cambridges’ closest confidantes and William’s parenting inspiration. They live just 15 miles away from Windsor in Bucklebury, which means they can help out with school runs and pop over for kitchen suppers.
Fort Belvedere – the turreted residence the Cambridges are thought to have their eye on – is surrounded by 135 acres of its own grounds, meaning it is as remote as any country castle within 30 minutes of London.
It was built in 1721 as a folly for another Wills, Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, younger son of King George II, and overlooks the lake of Virginia Water, which the duke also created. By the 19th century, it had been enlarged considerably; Queen Victoria used it as a tea house and it later became the love nest where Prince Edward and Wallis Simpson spent some of their happiest days, spending vast sums on decadent Sybil Colefax interiors. Since the Seventies, the Queen has rented the fort to the Canadian billionaire Galen Weston, who has also spent a fortune on it, carrying out substantial landscaping and commissioning garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith to rework the 120ft-long borders.
Eight-year-old Prince George, who is presumably bouncing off the walls of the current Kensington Palace apartment, will go crazy for the Swallows and Amazons- style grounds with pool and tennis court. His parents, meanwhile, will be relieved that they can at last pack him off to a proper country prep, with a full calendar of sporting fixtures. The obvious choice of school for him is Ludgrove, a boarding school in Wokingham, a few miles from Fort Belvedere, and Prince William and Harry’s alma mater. However, it’s all-boys, and Kate is thought to want her three children to attend the same establishment. nt.
Whispers are that Lambrook, a nurturing co-education n prep school near Ascot, is s currently top of their list. ist. “It’s ideal, because se the roads leading g to it are small and d rural, so they won’t be gawped wped at,” Barnes says. ays.
For George’s ge’s next stage, Wills and Kate can n battle it out between Eton, n, where Princes es William and Harry were at school, which h is within walking distance of the he castle, and Kate’s ate’s old school, the he co-educational nal Marlborough h
College, just over an hour away. Sources suspect that Kate will get her way. “She’s looking to give her children the sort of secure childhood she had,” Barnes says.
With a five-bedroom country house in the Windsor area costing more than £4 million, most of Prince George’s London school friends will be forced to move deeper into the Home Counties. The local toffs are flashier than those of the royal borough, a source says, hobnobbing with the likes of George and Amal Clooney, who have a £20million pile near Sonning, and Sir Elton John, who has a house in Old Windsor. But the royals, she says, tend to rub along quite nicely with the white Range Rover brigade, and they can relate to the Wentworth Estate oligarchs, who turn up at the school gates with their security guards. Takes one to know one.
Kate will also know, having grown up not so far away, that there are plenty of landed families to look out for on the school run: the Oppenheimers at Waltham Place, near Maidenhead, which they run as a biodynamic and organic farm, and the Benyons at Englefield on the other side of Reading, where her sister, Pippa, married James Matthews. And then there are the polo-playing Phillimores and Schwarzenbachs at Henley.
Barnes expects their social lives to become even busier as there’s always a party on the river. Soho House has pitched a safari tent in the grounds of the Oakley Court hotel in Windsor, and it’s jam-packed every weekend. “We have Michelin-star gastropubs pubs at Bray and Marlow; now we need The Pig, and The Newt [hotels] – that that’s s what life is like around aro here.”
There is also a tradition traditional side to life in Windsor, though, whic which offsets the bling. Kate can stock up th the fridge at the Windsor Farm shop, which sells produce from the Queen’s Q 3,000-acr acre royal farm. William c can get back into polo as there are regular p play-offs at Guards Polo Club and t the Royal Berk Berkshire Polo Groun Ground, and the couple can work on their golf handicaps at Sunning Sunningdale and Wentworth. Wentwo
It’s th the children who mi might take some p persuading that a move m to a rickety old castle is truly necessary. But ha having Legol Legoland nearby nearb might
just clinch c it.
‘People can be snotty about that area but it is mainly ignorance’