Mandarin Oriental
main register LHL-031 Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group
Grosvenor Estate — Duke of Westminster
The freehold under Mayfair and Belgravia. In 1677 Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies, a twelve-year-old heiress whose dowry was the Manor of Ebury — five hundred acres of marshland north of the Thames. Mayfair was laid out from 1720 and Belgravia from 1820 under Thomas Cubitt. Some three hundred acres remain in family hands, held by trusts for the Duke of Westminster; Hugh Grosvenor, the seventh Duke, inherited in 2016 at twenty-five. The family townhouse on Park Lane was demolished in the 1920s and the Grosvenor House Hotel built on its site. ⚑ The Leasehold Reform Act 1967 forced the estate to sell many freeholds to its tenants, and this register does not assert which individual houses remain on Grosvenor land.
Cadogan Estate — Earl Cadogan
Ninety-three acres of Chelsea and Knightsbridge, and the second largest surviving aristocratic freehold in central London. Sir Hans Sloane bought the Manor of Chelsea in 1712; his daughter Elizabeth married the 2nd Baron Cadogan in 1717 and the land has stayed in the family since. Sloane Street, Cadogan Square and the King’s Road are on it. The same Hans Sloane gave the British Museum its founding collection.
The Crown Estate
Holds Regent Street, Regent’s Park and property along Pall Mall and Piccadilly — some 242 addresses in central London. The estate is not the monarch’s private property: its surplus goes to the Treasury and the sovereign receives a grant from it. Under English law the Crown holds the superior interest in all land, which makes every other landlord on this page a tenant of it in the last resort.
Howard de Walden Estate
Ninety-two acres of eastern Marylebone, from Marylebone High Street to Portland Place, including Harley Street and its private medicine. The land was the Portland Estate until it passed to the Howard de Walden family in 1879. It is wholly family-owned; the head of the family is the 10th Baroness Howard de Walden.
The Portman Estate
Western Marylebone, from Manchester Square to the Edgware Road, held by the Portman family since the sixteenth century. Selfridges stands on Portman land — which makes the estate the landlord of an entry this register already holds as LHL-S-177 Selfridges.