You Can Rent Winston Churchill's Mayfair Bachelor Pad... For £74k

Will Noble
By Will Noble Last edited 55 months ago

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You Can Rent Winston Churchill's Mayfair Bachelor Pad... For £74k
150 Mount Street will cost you £75,000... to rent

Never was so much owed...

Certainly true about today's housing debacle in London, and in particular a Mayfair flat that's just gone on the rental market for £74,000 per year. (Yes, we said RENTAL market.)

Churchill in the days he wore top hats, starched wing collars, frock coats... and silk underwear

The memorabilia in the cigar shop it sits above is a clue to the flat's history: 105 Mount Street was the bachelor pad for one Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, while making hay during his youth between 1900 and 1905.

The cigar shop downstairs hints at who once lived upstairs

And make hay twenty-something Winston did: the well-heeled cad often ordered champagne, rich food and fine cigars from The Coburg hotel (now the Connaught) across the road; and entertained erudite women of the day, including Pamela Plowden, actor Ethel Barrymore and heiress Muriel Wilson.

Not sure what Churchill would make of today's refurb

Churchill did carry out some pretty important business from this address: it was while living here that he was first elected as a Conservative MP. It was also here that he drafted his 1904 resignation letter from the Tory party, defecting to the Liberals.

"We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us," Churchill said later on his career.

Hopefully you'll get more cooking done here than Churchill - notorious for his love of extravagant takeaways

Today, though 105 Mount Street appears from the outside much as it did in Churchill's time — its terracotta facade designed in 1888 still intact — it's all-change inside.

Seeing as the former PM smoked around 200,000 cigars in his lifetime — and that the creamy paint-job would be particularly susceptible to tobacco stains — we doubt he'd be getting his deposit back, were he renting today.

We don't know how much Churchill originally had to fork out for the flat. But given he was renting off his wealthy cousin Charles 'Sunny' Spencer-Churchill', the 9th Duke of Marlborough — and as Churchill was a dab hand at swerving bills — we reckon he got a slightly better deal than whoever's about to move in.

In case you do have a handy £1,550 kicking around each week, the place is yours. And in case it's a clincher, the flat comes fully furnished.

Images © Sophie Bremner (Lawrie Cornish)

Last Updated 12 August 2019