Crownland: what does the King own in London?

Digging into the royals' London property empire

Illustration by @cllmrolodex

Morning — details on how the King and Prince of Wales make their millions finally came to light at the end of last year, courtesy of a joint investigation from The Sunday Times and Channel 4. Their reporting identified for the first time the vast property empires of the royals, featuring lucrative commercial deals that are tax-exempt. But, when it came to King’s and Prince’s London estates, they only scratched the surface.

Today writer John Lubbock is going deeper, having spent the past few weeks digging into the spots across the capital owned by King Charles and Prince William. They’re a right jumble — from pubs to plots on the green belt — but one thing unites them: a tidy profit for the monarchy. Especially one warehouse in Southwark, which was once rented from the King by London’s police, and is now being used by the NHS.

John’s guide to London’s crownland is below.

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Pubs, warehouses and Billionaires’ Row: A guide to the royals’ London property empire

By John Lubbock

A few years ago, the Metropolitan Police was looking to move out of a central London warehouse that was costing the force a bomb. The Met had rented out Tower Bridge Business Park since the late 1980s, but as of the 2020s, it was paying £1.1m a year for the facility. Moreover, the site had become “surplus to requirements”, following the completion of a new warehouse in Belvedere, south east London. What exactly the force was storing there isn’t on the public record, but a job ad for a warehouse worker at Belvedere requires applicants to know how to process “non-police” firearms, ammo, explosives, cash and jewellery. Confiscated evidence, presumably.

So, in 2022, the Met told its landlord it was ready to leave. Through the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), a lease surrender agreement was negotiated with the landlord. There was a catch, however — the Met would have to pay a penalty for leaving the warehouse ahead of schedule. The exact amount of this early surrender premium was never disclosed, having been deemed commercially sensitive, but we know it was paid out of the Met’s financial reserves.

The above would have been a fairly unremarkable story of a public authority navigating London’s commercial property market and its eyewatering prices. That is, if it wasn’t for the identity of the warehouse’s landlord: the Duchy of Lancaster, the private fiefdom of King Charles.