London’s Great Estates

 I: The Portmans of Marylebone

We have forgotten just how much Britain’s capital owes to the Great Fire of 1666. The linking of Westminster with London proper and the creation of the West End had ramifications far beyond Wren’s new churches and a spruced-up Covent Garden. The Fire helped to put paid to the London plague, and also opened up large new spaces – acres and acres of fields to the north of the Thames – which were eagerly brought into the property spree. Spurred on by the property booms of the eighteenth century, these fields have become London’s “Great Estates”: arable spaces in the hands of landowners favoured enough by royal patronage between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Those fields are now some of the most expensive and important property in Europe.

Yet the faces behind these property empires are often as unknown as their history. More importantly, the role they play in shaping London’s most prosperous areas and its most lucrative markets falls under the radar, outside of society gossip magazines and tedious property journals. This series does not intend to launch an expose on the families which run the Great Estates, or to discover the secretive, politically charged reasons for their historic wealth. It merely plans to set out the history and continued importance of this small number of families, individuals and their property to the future not only of central London, but interests across the country.

Britain has always been a country of large wealth disparity, a problem the inherited fiefs of Belgravia and Kensington only help to highlight. But it is also a country which poses problems for landed investors – its exceptionally high death duties and declining international prominence, for example – which makes the story of how these families and their Estates have continued to prosper a more interesting one.

Perhaps this is all best represented by the Portman Estates. Having been given permission to buy 240 acres of land in Marylebone by Henry VIII in 1532, the family did not start developing their assets until the middle of the eighteenth century; the original Sir William Portman had in fact bought the land supposedly for the comfort of his wife. The land is ninety or so acres north of Oxford Street: Portman Square, Baker Street and Manchester Square lie within their possessions, including the buildings of Selfridges, the Wigmore Hall and the Wallace Collection. Valuations usually approach £2 billion, and it is all backed up by more large estates in the Home Counties.

As with all the families in this series, the Portmans have succeeded because they have paired security with longevity, avoiding the kinds of crises that might otherwise have befallen a Georgian property empire in the twentieth century. Successive deaths of the Viscounts in the early twentieth century incurred monumental death duties, which forced the family to sell vast swathes of their land. British tax laws aside, they have endured a rapidly changing capital in two simple ways: by welcoming foreign investment and by keeping their hands off.

The first is an obvious point: prices in Marylebone are very expensive, and many rich foreign investors either want to live there or hope for the chance of selling the property off at another price. The second is more complex. Whereas the Portman Estate used to end at the Tyburn gallows — a place to be avoided — this is now one of the most glamorous areas of the city, for which it has to thank the stylish developers behind every new “boutique” café, gastropub and footman-flanked hotel in the area. For the Estate, however, the strategy is to hold back: rather than directly developing their land, they hand control over and sit in for the long term. If the risk fails, they don’t suffer as poorly as the developers. If it goes well, their land becomes more profitable and, in the long-term, they prosper. It is not a headline-grabbing strategy, but it has secured the Portmans one of the most prominent seats at the international table of London property empires.

An unwillingness to fill the front pages marks the Portmans out. Their profile is noticeably low. The current Viscount, Christopher Portman, has overseen a vigorous period of reform in management and consolidation, but his name is hardly found in the press, except for the customary and occasional mention of the Estate as a whole.

Aside from overseeing the family firm, Portman Settled Estates Limited, the Viscount is involved with a number of obscure companies, supposedly based in America but listed as operating from southern England. Aqua Via and BioQ Pharma presumably exercise Portman’s personal interest in engineering and technology more than they do any financial interest. The family’s communications team do not give anything more away about the Viscount’s political or personal interests; even his tussle with The Sunday Times over its mention of his residence in Switzerland and insinuated association with tax-avoiding exiles garnered little press interest. Ejected by Blairite reforms from the House of Lords in 1999, Portman has emphasised the importance of leaseholding and increasing income through freeholds. This is scarcely the kind of material to offer much to the oligarch-hunting investigative reporters who take coffee in the chic Marylebone houses of his inspiration.

Such redevelopments are the most public display the family allows: Marylebone High Street has indeed been transformed into a veritable Eden of the debonair, while Chiltern Street near the famous station has morphed into a hub of spotless hoteliers and immaculate (often untouched) flats. Much of this redevelopment is shared with the estate of Howard de Walden, to be discussed later in this series. Yet, unlike more adventurous planners such as the Cadogans, the Portmans have largely maintained the original buildings of Marylebone; the most outlandish new-builds have come at Marble Arch and Edgware Road. Their temerity has at least earned them no new enemies, something which cannot equally be said for other Great Estates. New public spaces and clean streets are not just good PR: they also help raise prices. And there’s little to suggest that the income river of the Portmans won’t simply continue to flow in.

Such wealth means the veil of privacy has not always held up. The current Viscount’s half-brother Justin earned a modest notoriety by his short-lived marriage to the Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova. Notoriety was replaced by scandal, however, with the prosecution of Piers Portman – another half-brother – for anti-Semitic abuse. Now estranged from his family, Piers Portman was convicted of abusing the Campaign Against Antisemitism chief Gideon Falter outside Westminster Magistrates Court, which is built on land in the possession of his own family. He was sentenced to four months in prison. Nor does it seem as though the Portmans have had happy marital lives, not that such discord is unusual among the richest clans. The majority of the current generation are divorcees; information about the Viscount’s second wife, Patricia Pims, is scarce. But that is how the Portman family likes it.

What does this all have to tell us about the significance of the Portman Estate, then? At first, it surely reminds us that Estates of this kind cannot survive merely by sitting on their wealth, however large and however long-term. The Portmans have largely avoided scandal and navigated heavy British inheritance levies, but their success lies in essentially sensible if not necessarily altruistic management of their assets. Their political influence is perhaps more limited than the other families of the Great Estates – the impact of the Grosvenors and the Cadogans will be discussed later in this series. The effect of lockdowns has been combined with the ostracising of Russian clients and declining relations with China to make the lucrative market for the deserted flats of foreign oligarchs ever more difficult.

These potential tempests have been weathered by the Portman family’s undoubtedly impressive strategy of long-term investment in the places in which they hold assets – in the property, in its commercial potential, and in the role it plays in the international community of north London. These are not stories designed to grab the pages of the newspapers. But perhaps it is just this lucrative management, carefully guarded privacy and legal exploitation of what the twenty-first century has to offer the global rich clientele that explains why it would take another Great Fire to drive the Portmans off their cradled seat.

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