Who paid £139 million for a Regent’s Park mansion? Nobody knows.

Dear Londoners — as Storm Herminia rages on, we hope you’re safe inside (and not needing to catch a flight in the next day or so) and ready to read your weekly digest of all things of note in the capital.

It’s also worth noting that this is the last Monday briefing of January; a chance to take stock and reflect on how the year’s begun. Ours has been far better than usual, not least because of how proud we are of both our recent stories — including Ukrainian anti-drone devices, viral street clubs and Central London debates — and our growing paid subscriber community. 

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Big story: The £139 million mystery of the Regent’s Park mansion

Topline: The Holme, a “mini stately home” in Regent’s Park, has been sold for £139 million, making it one of most expensive houses in the capital. And, due to the UK’s opaque laws around the use of trusts, we have no idea who the buyer is.

What do we know?: Not much. Through land records, the Financial Times found that the house has been sold for £138.9 million to a UK subsidiary of wealth management firm Zedra, acting on behalf of an unknown client — far less than its 2023 estimate of £250 million.

Why don’t we know more?: Whoever bought the Holme used a trust. For years, transparency advocates have criticised the use of trusts to obscure the identities of wealthy buyers, in which it's near impossible for the public to find out the ultimate beneficiaries. 

As then-housing secretary Michael Gove said when proposing transparency in 2023: “Trusts can be used for wholly legitimate reasons. But they can, and are, created with deliberately labyrinthine structures to obscure the ownership of assets and make it easier for corrupt individuals to operate.” 

But there is some light at the end of the tunnel. New draft regulations published by the government will allow the UK public to apply for information about trusts held in the register of overseas property owners — if these are approved, they would come into effect from August.

Background: The former owner of the mansion was Saudi Prince Khaled bin Sultan al-Saud. In 1991, Prince Khaled bought the Holme for £34 million via an investment company, the Guernsey-registered Quendon Limited (Quendon later listed five of Prince Khaled’s children as beneficial owners in Companies House). The royal used the house — among other assets — to secure financing on loans such as a private jet in 2016, which were then defaulted on. The Holme then fell into the hands of creditors Trinity Investments, who put it up for sale in 2023 for £250 million.

Is it worth it?: Is any house worth that much? Still, it sounds pretty nice: as well as its 40 bedrooms, tennis court and swimming pool, the Regency mansion sits next to Regent Park’s boating lake, a stone’s throw from both the London zoo and the US ambassador’s residence. A 1988 BBC news segment called it the “ultimate desirable residence”, while architecture critic Ian Nairn stated: “if you want a definition of Western civilisation in a single view, then here it is.” 

The bottom-line: A tangled web of wealthy individuals, lawyers, hedge funds and foreign-registered investment companies, the story of the Holme is, in many ways, the story of how London came to be the playground of the world’s ultra-rich.

Your news briefing

💧 Might the saga of Thames Water finally be nearing an end? The scandal-ridden water company is £15 billion in debt, and now administrators have been approached to force it into temporary nationalisation. As a result, its credit rating has been slashed. The company is currently looking to find “£3bn in emergency funding to stave off collapse”. 

🌉 Work is due to begin on Lambeth Bridge later this month, aimed at waterproofing, repairs and, thankfully, adding a cycle lane. According to TFL data, the northern junction of the bridge is “the most dangerous in the capital in terms of cycle collisions”. Between 1 September 2021 and 31 August 2024, “cyclists were involved in 22 of the 31 collisions that happened at the roundabouts there”. According to reports, there will be a southbound closure for traffic between 10 February and 15 December 2025, though pedestrian access will be mostly maintained.

🏠 In a recent win for London’s renters, Westminster City Council has had to pay one of their tenants almost £4,800 after “taking 11 months to repair exposed electrical wires in his bathroom”. At the time of the initial complaint in 2023, the tenant was reportedly living alone and suffering from “asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and depression”. The council admitted that their response had been late and “the subsequent investigation should have been more thorough”.

Got a story for us to look into? Please get in touch at editor@the-londoner.co.uk.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of TfL’s beloved Art on the Underground project. But what about art about the underground? Our money’s on this Miroslav Šašek piece from his delightful 1959 book, This Is London, but comment or email us with your favourites.

If you missed it, have a read of our founder Joshi Herrmann’s story about how ruthless private equity investors have caused nursery prices to skyrocket. “I see friends going through the stages of shock, anger and denial,” Herrmann writes, “as major chunks of their income disappear into the bank accounts of companies with names like Little Muffins and Little Forest Folk.” Click here to find out why. 

From dawn till dusk 

We all know London can be unbearably huge. So every week we’ll take you through an ideal day across the city using our little black book of the best London venues. We hope it’ll be equal parts glitz to spit and Tube-dust.

Breakfast: We try to avoid recommending spots that regularly appear on tourist guides, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t insist that you visit the Regency Cafe — especially since it was reported, last month, that it would be up for sale. A London institution, the art deco eatery first opened in 1946 and has appeared in a slew of films and TV shows. 

Lunch: The food at Peckham’s Little Deli God Bless might be even better than its delightful name. Specifically their five pound lunch deal, which includes jerk meats or curry, plus rice and salad. You can also get yourself a Guinness Punch as a treat. Locals hold a genuine, lasting affection for Little Deli God Bless, and you can easily see why. 

Drinks: The very first time the Londoner team met up, it was at the Gladstone Arms, up an unassuming street in the middle of Borough. There’s a simple reason for this: it’s a really good pub. The staff are friendly, the prices are average and the atmosphere is cosy without being twee. 

Dinner: A common complaint about London is the lack of late night eats. While this isn’t undeserved — particularly compared to other major cities — it’s also not entirely true, especially in the unlikely environs of Holborn. Pub-weary wanderers seeking a plate of something delicious before heading home should make for Meeting Noodles on Grays Inn Road, which serves chewy, tender bowls of homemade noodles until 2am.

Later: In a city of constant decline, a late night pub brought back from the brink of death feels about as common as a sub £5 pint. And yet, in 2023, that was exactly what happened to Hackney boozer The Dolphin, which was not only resuscitated but allowed to retain its 3am weekend closure time. It’s not a pretty, cheap or particularly life-changing pub by any means, but there’s something comforting about a venue there for you even as everything else has closed its doors.

Our favourite reads

Innit innit boys and Super Eagles: how Nigerian Londoners found their identity through football — Aniefiok Ekpoudom, The Guardian

A beautiful long read from the author of Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain. Ekpoudom explores the ascendency of Nigerian footballers from John Fashanu to Jay-Jay Okocha, and what that means for the children of the Nigerian diaspora. This is not merely a brilliant read about football, though, but one about belonging.  

The incinerator, the nature reserve and the missing £2.2m bond — London Spy

A fascinating investigation by the team at London Spy into the absolute chaos in Sutton Council’s plans for a multimillion pound new country park that they handed over to corporate partners. What followed is a three decade story of failures from accidentally losing millions in funding and licensing trash incinerators in the middle of the proposed park to massive extinction of the protected species the park was supposed to save.

London from the archive

For a slice of old-school Cockney life, watch Knees Up, Mother Brown (1964). The short film follows Stepney septuagenarians Annie, Lilly, Maud and Sarah as they meet at the Darby and Joan Club, a social club for Britain's elderly that opened its first branch in Streatham in 1942.

To Do List

You still have time to visit the first major exhibition devoted to Tirzah Garwood at Dulwich Picture Gallery. The exhibition runs until May and traces out the oeuvre of the visionary artist, designer and printmaker who’s still primarily known as the wife of Eric Ravilious. Exploring Garwood’s ‘sophisticated naïve’ approach, the exhibition contains 80 of her works — oil paintings, wood engravings, pencil sketches, experimental marbled papers, and collaged paper constructions. 

If you’d like to sample some up-and-coming talent, head to the ICA for their annual New Contemporaries show. This year’s selection features 35 artists, selected through an open call by artists Liz Johnson Artur, Permindar Kaur and Amalia Pica. Themes include “the fluctuations and cycles in the natural world, sustainability and decay; boundaries, borders and fragmented memories; the commodification of mindfulness, self-care, pop culture and consumerism”. 

This week in London history

28 January 1807 — the first gas lamps were lit on Pall Mall by Friedrich Alber Wintzer (read our piece on the history of London’s lights)

30 January 1969 — the Beatles played their last ever gig on the roof of the Apple Records office at No. 3, Saville Row.

1 February 1814 — the last Frost Fair began on the Thames, with an elephant led along the ice from Blackfriars Bridge.