
It is said that the rich are not more than three generations, but this truth does not seem to be true in Britain.
Over the past few years, several major British families have been quietly inheriting and expanding land, and their wealth has snowballed more and more.
In today's article, we'll focus on the five families that own central London.
They are:
Grosvenor Estate
British Royal Crown Estate
Portman Family Portman Estate
Cadogan Family Cadogan Estate
Howard de Walden Estate
To this day, these families still control the most precious land resources in the center of London, although they are secretive, but they are rich and invincible, and they have named many streets in London with their own surnames.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="21" > our previous article "How Much Land Do the British Nobility Have?" Today's Britain, there is still a third of the land belonging to the noble family. </h1>
In London alone, these British aristocrats own 1,300 acres, or at least one-eighth, of the 8,300 acres of land in central London.
The five families highlighted in this article are also responsible for holding 32% of the land and property in London's West End, with a total value of up to £22.8 billion, because they have inherited their ancestral inheritance.
The wealth brought by the land also allows these hereditary nobles to dominate the British rich list for many years.
In the Times' 2021 Rich List, released in May this year, all four families (except crown estate's British royal family) made it into the top 100.
Hugh Grosvenor, 30-year-old 7th Duke of Westminster, owner of Grosvenor Estate, ranks 12th on the Times' 2021 rich list for £10.054 billion;
The heir to cadogan estate, the 8th Earl Cadogan, and his family fortune are worth £6.37 billion, ranking 24th on the rich list;
Mary Hazel Caridwen Czernin, owner of howard de Walden Estate and 10th-generation Baroness Howard de Walden, and her family are worth £3.722 billion, ranking 46th;
The 10th Viscount Portman is worth £2 billion, ranking 82nd on the rich list.
Next, we will talk about these five families in detail:
London is the world, and even more so for these five families
1.Grosvenor Estate
Grosvenor family
Grosvenor Estate, hereditary to the Duke of Westminster, the seventh heir of the Grosvenor family, is London's largest and richest property company.
Through this property company, the Grosvenor family owns 200 acres and 100 acres of land in London's wealthy districts of Belgravia and Mayfair, respectively, according to the data.
As one of the highest-priced locations in London, mayfair average £21,000 per square metre. It is this sky-high price that has brought the total value of all land owned by Grosvenor Estate in these two areas to £4.9 billion.
In addition to land in London, the Grosvenor family owns nearly 100,000 acres of land in Scotland.
The Grosvenor family currently owns 0.22% of the land in the UK, and it owns 7 times more land than the Queen of England's land assets, the data shows.
Historical sources show that the grosvenor family's ancestry dates back to the Norman Conquest.
Despite the family's long history, the Grosvenor family's asset expansion began only in 1677.
Sir Thomas, the ancestor of the Duke of Westminster at the time, married a wealthy heiress, Mary Davies, who had just inherited a medieval manor house, 500 acres of marshes, pastures and orchards in London's Middlesex.
It is also worth mentioning that there is another figure in the Grosvenor family who is also famous, that is, the second generation of the Duke of Westminster, who is also called Hugh Grosvenor.
The old ancestor had a decade-long relationship with Ms Chanel, and some people say that the Chanel logo on many lampposts in central London originated from this.
Today, in addition to owning a large amount of land in the UK, the Grosvenor family also holds a large number of real estate properties around the world through the Grosvenor Estate, including residences, office buildings, shopping malls and so on in the world's first-tier cities.
Once, when asked the 6th Duke of Westminster for advice on how to give young entrepreneurs some advice, he replied, "Make sure they have an ancestor who was a close friend of William The Conqueror the Conqueror." "Don't shy away from your identity as the successor to your old money."
In 2016, Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, died of a sudden heart attack.
His only son, Hugh Grosvenor, born in 1991 at the age of 25, became the 7th Duke of Westminster and is now worth more than £10 billion.
2. Crown Estate
British Royal Family
Among the five large landowners of London, Crown Estate's identity is special because its owner is not an ordinary British nobleman, but a Queen of England.
The majority of Crown Estate's assets are properties, 58% of which are in central London, including almost all of Regent Street, a prime shopping street in central London, and more than half of the properties in St James, the back garden for the wealthy.
In addition, Crown Estate holds 358,000 hectares of land and a total of 15 large shopping malls in Liverpool, Swansea, Slough and Nottingham, as well as office properties in Birmingham, Manchester, Cambridge and other places.
Crown Estate also holds more than 140,000 hectares of agricultural land and forests in the UK, as well as seabeds across the UK, as well as a large number of offshore wind power projects.
It is worth mentioning that although the assets of Crown Estate are nominally owned by the Queen, the Queen cannot sell them herself, because these assets belong to all future British kings and cannot be counted as the Queen's private property.
In other words, Crown Estate's property does not belong to the Queen after her abdication and will automatically pass to the next British monarch.
Essentially, the Crown Estate is a trust fund run by a special committee that reports to the British Parliament, which then decides how much to hand over to the Royal Family (15% in these years), with the rest of the profits going to the British Treasury.
3.Portman Estate
The Portman family
Portman Estate, owned by the Portman family, owns at least 110 acres of property in London's Marylebone area, with a total value of around £1.7 billion.
In 1532, Henry VIII's Chief Justice, Sir William Portman, bought a large tract of land in Marylebone for shepherding sheep.
As the city of London expanded, it soon became a small district, and the portman family's wealth increased.
4. Howardde Walden Estate
The Howard de Walden family
Howard de Walden Estate, owned by the Howard de Walden family, owns 92 acres of land in London and more than 850 freehold properties.
The land held by the Howard de Walden family in London is also located around Marylebone, extending north to Marylebone Road and south to Wigmore Street, including Marylebone High Street and Harley Street, adjacent to the land parcels owned by Portman Estate.
The howard de Walden family's history dates back to around 1710.
The current head of the family is Marie Hazel Carridwin Zenin, the 10th Baroness Howard de Walden, but the management of the real estate business has been handed over to professional manager Andrew Hynard.
The Howard de Walden family has been renovating the Marylebone since the 1990s, which is now one of London's most exquisite districts.
5. Cadogan Estates
Cardogan family
The Cardogan family's Cardogan Estate holds 93 acres of land in London's Kensington-Chelsea area, worth £6 billion.
Specifically, their land holdings are concentrated in chelsea, Knightsbridge, Sloane Square and King's Road.
As one of the highest-priced locations in London, Kensington-Chelsea properties are very popular with the richest in the Middle East and Russia.
The history of the Cardogan family dates back to the early 18th century.
The founder of the family group, Sir Hans Sloane, was a well-known British naturalist, physician and collector at the time.
In the early 18th century, Hans Sloan bought 11 buildings in Chelsea, West London, covering more than 166 acres.
In 1717, Hans's eldest daughter, Elisabeth, married Charles Cardogan, then Count, and after the marriage of the two families, Hans's daughter also changed her surname to Cardogan.
After Hans's death in 1753, he left the land to his daughter and son-in-law, who also donated more than 71,000 pieces of his collection to the state in accordance with her will, which became the beginning of the British Museum.
Despite the change of surname, the Cardogan family named kensington Chelsea's busiest street Sloane Street in honor of the elderly Mr. Hans Sloane.
British investors write at the end
London is the world's, and it's also the family's.
Whether it is the royal property owned by the Queen of England or the ancestral inheritance inherited by the descendants of major families, it reflects the protection of private property by British housing property rights, so that wealth has not been diluted in the long river of time.
At the same time, we are also seeing new foreign companies with no British family background quietly seizing control of central London, including the Qatari royal family, Norwegian sovereign funds, Chinese mainland and Hong Kong's rich.