The Bishops Avenue: murder, money & mayhem on Billionaires’ Row
The Bishops Avenue – the north-london boulevard that the international elite call home – epitomises the rise and fall of the fortunes of the world’s richest people. Frances Hedges investigates the mysteries, murders and myths of this British Billionaires’ Row
There are some streets that belong more to the realm of myth than reality. In our collective imagination, the ChampsElysées remains a picture-perfect paradise, no matter how many soulless department stores have taken up residence along its tree-lined pavements. Rodeo Drive conjures up images of moneyed Californian heiresses being chauffeured to their personalshopping appointments. Carnaby Street will always be synonymous with the Swinging Sixties; Baker Street with Sherlock Holmes. And then, in north London, there is the Bishops Avenue – a road that occupies a strange, liminal space between fact and fiction, prosperity and decline, beauty and grotesquerie. It has attracted its fair share of satire: Evelyn Waugh placed his fictional newspaper baron, the fearsome Lord Copper, here in his novel Scoop, while Elton John immortalised it in his 1988 parody of John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’ (‘Why not talk about Bishops Avenue/i’ve got a lovely house on Bishops Avenue,’ he crooned wryly). Yet such gentle mockery has failed to tarnish the street’s reputation as the ultimate emblem of power and prestige, its 66 colossal mansions earning it the nickname ‘Billionaires’ Row’.
Geographically, the status of the Bishops Avenue is ambiguous. Part of it belongs to the Hampstead Garden Suburb conservation area – a beautifully landscaped north-london neighbourhood founded as an egalitarian housing project by the social reformer Henrietta Barnett – but the majority falls outside of its borders, much to the chagrin of local planners. A meeting point for three different London boroughs (Barnet, Haringey and Camden), the street is officially part of the N2 postcode area, its less-popular northern limb languishing in East Finchley, but it opens out at the favoured southerly end into the glorious green expanses of Hampstead Heath (NW3) and the Highgate School playing fields (N6).
Such technicalities may seem absurd, but postcode snobbery is practically an art form in north London. Legend has it that Waugh, who lived on North End Road on the outskirts of Hampstead, used to make a regular pilgrimage to a particular postbox so that his letters would receive the more fashionable NW3 postmark. My own father was similarly sensitive to such subtleties, rejoicing when we finally secured our Hampstead home – supposedly a golden ticket to becoming part of the liberal intelligentsia – while bemoaning the fact that we were not quite residents of the borough of Camden (we had unhappily landed just inside the Barnet perimeter – in his view, vastly infra dig). As for our neighbours in Hampstead Garden Suburb, they belonged to another tribe entirely. During school holidays, I would occasionally visit a classmate (the daughter of a well-known television personality) who lived on one of the smartest roads in the conurbation. There was a trampoline in the
enormous garden, a lot of expensive marble, walk-in wardrobes in the bedrooms and multiple fridges brimming with Marks & Spencer ready meals. It was heaven for a 10-yearold girl, but it was also, as I quickly learnt, symptomatic of what earned residents of the Garden Suburb – once such a utopian scheme – that most dreaded of labels: nouveau riche. And, to my parents, there was no street that epitomised flashy new money more perfectly than the Bishops Avenue.
I cannot fault their perspicacity; and yet, their view does not quite do justice to the chameleon-like quality of this unique thoroughfare, its spirit of reinvention, its sheer tenacity. For every story of decay there is one of resurrection; for every ghastly palace that springs up there is a building steeped in history; for every ugly basement built below ground there is a beautiful rooftop garden bursting into bloom up above. Ever since its foundation, this street has told a tale of contrasts – of ambitions pursued or abandoned, of wild (and sometimes eccentric) dreams fulfilled or forgotten. Change has been the Bishops Avenue’s only constant, right back to its foundations in the early 20th century: named in honour of the Bishop of London, Arthur WinningtonIngram, it was originally intended for use as church land, but was soon sold into private ownership and swiftly became a magnet for the rich and famous. The actress Gracie Fields and her husband Archie were among the earliest to spot the street’s potential, constructing a splendid red-brick mansion, Tower, which they filled with luxurious furnishings: Persian carpets in the hallway, gold panelling in the ballroom, floor-to-ceiling marble in the bathrooms and myriad mirrors throughout. ‘They thought about the design for more than a year before the first brick was laid, and since then they have spent every spare hour in finding the very fittings they desired,’ wrote one awed visitor.
Tower may have long since been demolished, but there are still those who share the bold vision of the Bishops Avenue’s original power couple. Since the 1990s, the billionaire art collectors Poju and Anita Zabludowicz have reportedly owned adjacent ‘his and hers’ mansions on the street, using them to display some of their thousands of masterpieces. In November 2017, Salma Hayek and her husband François-henri Pinault – the chairman and CEO of Kering, which owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander Mcqueen, along with other leading fashion houses – moved in to a Grade Ii-listed property originally built in 1910 by William Park Lyle, heir to the Tate & Lyle fortune. Decorated with elegance and panache, the 15-bedroom property has played host to some memorable celebrations: Annie Lennox, Keira Knightley and Colin Firth were among those to grace its halls for a 2017 dinner in aid of the charity Mothers2mothers, of which Hayek is a patron. Equally well-known is the couple’s predecessor at the mansion, Justin Bieber, who had previously rented the house to use as a London base during his autumn 2016 arena tour. While living there, the football-mad
star even made an impromptu appearance at the nearby Highgate School – where TS Eliot once taught – the morning after one of his shows, delighting pupils by joining in their kickabout.
What is it, exactly, that attracts everyone from Bieber and the Pinaults to Lakshmi Mittal and the Sultan of Brunei – not to mention media moguls and Premier League footballers – to the Bishops Avenue? ‘Where else in London can you buy such a large residence and have 800 acres of heathland on your doorstep, two golf courses, space to land your private helicopter and an airport within half an hour?’ points out Trevor Abramsohn, the founder and managing director of Glentree Estates, which has operated in the Kenwood area since 1976 and now sells 90 per cent of all local properties. Owning a home on the Bishops Avenue is, he says, ‘a bit like having a Rolls-royce – it’s a way of saying “I am rich” on a placard’. He adds that the road (and indeed Hampstead Garden Suburb as a whole) has a particularly strong appeal for overseas buyers, who can take their pick of the capital’s best shops, restaurants and schools.
So it is that whenever there have been expats looking for a place to park their cash – whether Russian oligarchs, Nigerian oil millionaires, Indian industrialists or, more recently, Chinese tech entrepreneurs – there has been a surge of interest in the area. King Constantine II took refuge in its leafy environs after the coup against the Greek monarchy in 1967; he bought a 13-bedroom home on Linnell Drive, near the Bishops Avenue, where he lived for 46 years. (He was also godfather to Prince William, and Abramsohn recalls regularly seeing Princess Diana driving her two sons round to the house of the exiled King in order to attend one of his famously lavish parties.) Next came the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled his native country after his overthrow in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, settling in the neighbourhood along with a host of supporters. It was the Saudi Arabian Royal Family, however, who were to have the most lasting impact on the Bishops Avenue when, between 1989 and 1993, they reportedly bought 10 of the houses on the street. Brokered by the then Saudi envoy Rafiq al-hariri (later the Prime Minister of Lebanon) in the early days of the Gulf War, the deal was designed to offer a safe haven in the event of an escalation of the threat to Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein. This never materialised, and so the suite of expensively purchased properties stood mostly empty, abandoned by wealthy owners who neither needed their sanctuary nor wanted to go to the trouble of paying the massive upkeep costs that they generated daily.
It makes for a strange sight on visiting the Bishops Avenue today. Behind the looming electronic gates and forbidding signs proclaiming that ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’, several of the mansions believed to have been owned by the Saudis have been left to rot, their once-majestic columns cracked and covered in moss, plaster peeling from the walls
and gardens overgrown with weeds. Despite the ubiquitous warnings about guard dogs, I can see holes in the fencing where urban explorers have clearly smuggled their way in; earlier this year, eerie video footage captured by a group of enterprising Youtubers was released into the public domain, revealing rainwater-filled swimming pools, doors hanging off their hinges and stainedglass windows caked in grime.
The haunting pictures feel strangely apt for a street that has always attracted mystery and intrigue. Perhaps most notoriously, the Bishops Avenue became the site of the so-called ‘silver bullets murder’ in 1985 when, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, the Greek-cypriot fashion tycoon Aristos Constantinou was found dead in his seven-bedroom home, shot six times by polished-nickel bullets, after returning from a party with his wife Elena. The death was initially attributed to a burglary, but the lack of evidence (no new fingerprints were found at the scene) and the unusual choice of weapon (an Italian-made gun that had been out of production since 1961) meant that the case remained unsolved. Decades later, Constantinou’s son Anthony – apparently not spooked by the curse of the Garden Suburb – decided to rent a property on Wildwood Road, just a short stroll away from the site of his father’s murder. In 2016, he was sentenced to 12 months in jail for sexually assaulting two women at the Heron Tower headquarters of his City financial group Capital World Markets.
The Constantinous are not the only local residents to have had their good fortunes brought to an abrupt end. Other colourful characters have included the Sri Lankan insurance swindler Emil Savundra, whose fraudulent activities were publicly exposed in a 1967 television interview with David Frost; the businessman Alec Hubbers, who was beaten to death with a champagne bottle by a jealous mistress in 1982; and the Lebanese oil magnate Ely Calil – once accused of involvement in a plot to topple the government of Equatorial Guinea – whose rented house was raided by a gang of burglars in 2008. No wonder anyone who lives on the Bishops Avenue is anxious about security, as the host of patrol vehicles, staffed by burly-looking officers, attests. David Wolff, an architect whose practice has designed a number of properties on the road, tells me that the atmosphere among residents is one of fear and isolation. ‘There was a case just a few weeks ago when our clients were attacked on the street by moped gangs who followed them into the building – they even injured some of the staff,’ he says. ‘The more attacks there are, the more people want to build boundaries around their properties, and so it becomes an iceberg territory.’
The lack of community spirit is compounded by the constant construction taking place all the way along the road as its mansions are demolished, rebuilt and then knocked down again. Locals complain of noise and air pollution on what is already a traffic-heavy route; one disgruntled north Londoner, Philip Smith, recently wrote to the Ham & High
to express his annoyance at being forced to cycle through a ‘cloud of cement dust’ because of the ‘building work going on in the opulent monuments to bad taste’.
Indeed, the ‘bad taste’ that characterises some of the Bishops Avenue’s architecture has long been a source of frustration to community planners. Michael BallaGoddard, an architectural consultant and the chair of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Conservation Area Advisory Committee, says that ‘the street lends itself to a degree of fantasy that people can indulge in’, resulting in a hotchpotch of styles that lack architectural coherence, from the neoclassical to the hyper-modern and everything in between. ‘There have been some pretty monstrous buildings that have slipped through the net, like Toprak Mansion [now Royal Mansion], which is a bit like a toytown version of a Greek temple,’ he tells me, referring to a palatial property built by the Turkish businessman Halis Toprak, who allegedly only lived there for two days before putting it on the market. (Its purchase in 2008 by a Kazakhstani buyer was, incidentally, one of Glentree Estates’ biggest successes; Trevor Abramsohn remembers hosting a party in the home to celebrate the record-breaking £50 million sale, complete with champagne, beluga caviar and Mikhail Gorbachev as the guest of honour.) Balla-goddard laments the lack of agency that he and his colleagues have to prevent the ‘crass’ constructions that go up. ‘We have some very good officers who try to contribute to the conservation, but the people who buy these places have limitless funds,’ he says with a sigh. ‘So they’ll go to appeal, and then the appeal will come back with amendments and conditions.’
Yet much as the onslaught of construction may leave a sour taste in the mouth of residents and planners, investment in the area is vital for its resurgence, if the empty mansions are not to continue falling to rack and ruin. With the market in a stagnant state amid Brexit uncertainty, it has been far harder for estate agents to attract buyers to properties that require both a colossal capital injection and steep ongoing maintenance costs. ‘I think the area has suffered because of the demographic of the clients,’ says Mark Pollack, a founding partner and sales director at Aston Chase. ‘There was a lot of Russian and Middle Eastern money that came in, and as some of those parties have had assets seized or monies frozen, it has reduced the volume of buyers, concurrent with stamp duty and political upheaval.’ Pollack appears relieved to have recently concluded a deal on Kenmore House, a derelict property on a 1.7-acre site whose value was quoted at £22.5 million when it first went on the market in 2016, before sinking to about £15 million this year. He calls the sale a ‘speculative purchase’, but will not divulge whether the new owner intends to restore the original mansion, split it into several smaller residences or turn it into flats.
The latter two approaches are becoming increasingly common as property developers seek to take advantage of a new breed of ‘uber tenant’ – super-rich clients with multiple homes who recognise that it is more tax-efficient for them to rent a property for a year and avoid the punishing stamp duty on a purchase. I pay a visit to one of the mansions in the Bishops London development, marketed at £22,000 a week, to learn what life might be like for someone with infinite liquid assets. It offers all that a fun-loving, privacy-obsessed resident – a Justin Bieber, say – could want: security gates with a 24-hour guard, a cinema-room, wine and champagne stores, a basement leisure complex with pool, gym and sauna, and staff accommodation big enough to house a full entourage.
It’s a bit like being onboard a luxury cruise ship, where everything is served up on a silver platter before you even know you want it – and that’s exactly the point of such properties, as Dean Main of Rhodium Residence Management explains. ‘The idea is that someone can move in and have everything there, right down to the cutlery,’ he says of the Buxmead development, where he is marketing and managing 11 of the 20 plush apartments. ‘It’s designed like a five-star hotel – there’s a private garage with a lift taking you straight up to your apartment, so if you’re a celebrity and don’t want to be seen, or go through communal areas, you can have that privacy and discretion.’ There’s even an in-house hair salon so that residents can bring in their own hairstylists rather than face the ignominy of the high street.
Main teamed up with the Czech billionaire Radovan Vitek of CPI Property Group to buy the portfolio of flats earlier this year from the original developer, Harrison Varma, which appears not to have found the influx of buyers it had anticipated. (‘With hindsight, I wouldn’t do it again,’ says Anil Varma when I ask him how he feels about the project.) By targeting the rental market, Main may find a more receptive audience, though he will certainly need to harness the full force of his expertise in ‘lifestyle management’ in order to satisfy the demands of clients renting at this price level. One local concierge, who looks after a super-prime estate on the road, tells me stories of having to source everything from cigars and Ferraris to rare-breed South African horses for demanding tenants.
This all seems a far cry from the idyll that one famous Hampstead Garden Suburb resident, Elizabeth Taylor, nostalgically recalled when looking back on her life on Wildwood Road in the 1930s. ‘The happiest days of my youth were when my brother and I would run through the woods and feel quite safe,’ she wrote in 2007. ‘I wonder whether the Suburb is still like that now. I do hope so.’ Hardly – though Taylor was also a woman who believed in survival, and in second, third or even eighth chances, so perhaps she would, after all, be glad to know that there are still those who are prepared to invest in the neighbourhood’s next life cycle. The Bishops Avenue has always been a place of myth and mystery, a source of stories both magical and macabre. As for what its next chapter will be, only time will tell…