In many ways, it was just like the hundreds of other village and church fetes that took place around the country on Saturday. There was a coconut shy, a tombola, a magician and a burger stall.
But the houses overlooking the St Mary The Boltons fete in South Kensington are anything but ordinary. The white stucco-fronted mansions surrounding the barbecue and secondhand bookstall are worth, on average, a fraction under £20m each, making this the third-most expensive street in the country.
“We must be standing on the most expensive real estate in the world,” said David, a long-standing member of St Mary’s congregation, who lives a few streets away. “But you won’t find any of the owners at our fete. You probably won’t find any of them at home from one month to the next.
“You have to have at least £20m to live on this street, obviously no real people live here. You have to be an Arab prince, or an oligarch to afford to live here.”
Toby Brown, sales director of upmarket estate agents TLC, said the street, built in the middle of the 19th century by the architect and journalist George Godwin, was extremely sought after by British aristocracy and wealthy buyers from the US, the Middle East and Russia.
Brown, who was manning the Pimms stall at the fete, said houses on the street very rarely came up for sale. “People love The Boltons so much, they tend to stay here until they die, but when properties do come up, they are very popular,” he said. “Two smaller ones at the north end sold for £25m last year.”
The last full-size home to sell was a four-storey, nine bedroom mansion complete with cinema, indoor swimming pool and Japanese garden. It sold for £51m in 2015 to an offshore company. The stamp duty alone set back the unknown buyer £7.6m, and the owner is paying £220,000 a year in extra tax in order to keep their identity a secret.
Previous residents of the street have included Madonna, Jeffrey Archer and US actor Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, who lived at No 28 and invited the Queen for dinner in the 1950s.
Reverend Jenny Welsh, the vicar of St Mary, said she had not knowingly met any of the church’s immediate neighbours a year after taking up her post. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t come to church, or aren’t here today and haven’t introduced themselves,” she said. “The church is for everyone to be human. I’d hope that people who live extraordinary lives can come to church and feel ordinary. We are all humans at the end of the day.
“This is a very ordinary fete, it just happens to be in a wonderful location ... And yes the neighbours to this triangle garden are very wealthy.”
Edward Quinton, 66, a mechanical engineer and church warden, said the people who own the houses were rarely seen. “This fete is for the congregation and local people, the location may be extraordinary, but the people here are ordinary enough for Kensington and Chelsea.”
His wife, Katrina, who was helping man the coconut shy, said some of the rich neighbours had been “very generous” towards upkeep of the church and had donated some of the top prizes of the raffle, which included lessons at Chelsea FC’s soccer school and afternoon tea for two at the Savoy.
Over £3 glasses – or rather plastic cups – of Pimms, Marcus, an upmarket decorator, said he had hung handmade wallpaper in some of the nearby homes that cost the owners up to £40,000 a room. “There is an unbelievable amount of money being spent on these homes, but the owners aren’t really living there like we live in our homes. Go and look at how many are empty and have security shutters up,” he said. “They treat these as hotel rooms for when they are in London, they will have several homes across the world.”
Many of the houses, which almost all bristle with CCTV cameras, are locked up with shutters and have blinds drawn at all the windows. But a sprightly gentleman and his wife popped out of the front door of one of the houses on the western side of the street, which is favoured for its larger gardens and evening sunlight.
“I’m not giving you my name and you can’t say what number I live in,” he said immediately. “But we do live here, we’re one of the last [British owner occupiers]. I bought it in the 1980s when the prices were well down, and I do have to say I don’t like what has happened here.
“You know what I mean, there is a lot of rich people who have moved here, and no you won’t find them at the fete or in the community,” he said as he crossed the road and walked through the church gates festooned with the red, white and blue bunting.
