When Princess Anne isn’t carrying out one of her 470-plus royal engagements each year, she’s living a quiet life on her Gatcombe Park estate. Situated in Gloucestershire not far from King Charles’s country retreat, Highgrove House, the historic home dates back to the late 1700s and gives the Princess Royal hundreds of acres of peace and privacy. Although she has access to travel like a VIP from her private estate, one Cotswolds neighbor recently told the Daily Express that Anne prefers a more low-key method of transportation.
British TV personality Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, who lives in the nearby village of Siddington, told the media outlet that he’s spotted Princess Anne at their local train station on numerous occasions.
"I've met her on the train quite often, yeah we're on kind of nodding terms,” Llewelyn-Bowen said. “She travels with a few burly but super smart military types, all very very unfussy. No one bats an eyelid, we're all used to her.”
It should come as no surprise that the no-nonsense Princess Royal prefers to take public transportation rather than make a fuss traveling by chauffeur, but Llewelyn-Bowen revealed that Anne wasn't the only royal he's seen taking the commuter train.
The interior designer and Changing Rooms star shared that King Charles also “used to do it lots as well, at our local station Kemble.”
Since there are frequent trains to London from Kemble, where Anne’s son, Peter Phillips, married Harriet Sperling in June, Llewelyn-Bowen shared that many celebrities end up on the rail line. “There are moments where the train to Paddington is more star-studded than the Expresso Bar at The Ivy,” he quipped.
As for Phillips and his sister, Zara Tindall, Llewelyn-Bowen said he runs into them “quite a lot,” adding, “Peter is someone we know quite well and again, this is one of them things about our end of the Cotswolds, is that everyone sort of gets on well with each other in a very informal way.”
