Jason Marple’s lawn is mowed into sharp stripes. But halfway from his back door to the neighbouring field, the strips stop, and the back half is an overgrown tangle. He doesn’t own that part. King Charles III does. “I’m not mowing his half. I wish he’d mow it more often,” Marple jokingly complained.
The back of Marple’s garden is a very small part of the new king’s Sandringham country estate, in north Norfolk, where the royals traditionally celebrate Christmas.
Marple’s semi-detached cottage in Flitcham is one of the few houses in the area not owned by the royals. In this village alone, at least 39 properties are owned by Charles. There is a clear giveaway. “Anything with a light blue door belongs to the king,” one of Marple’s neighbours explained.
It’s not just Flitcham; the light blue doors – the colour was chosen by the queen mother – can be seen in 12 other villages nearby. Many houses also show their royal connections through names such as Diamond Jubilee, Victoria or Queen’s cottages. In total, more than 300 residential properties in the area, together worth about £75m, are owned by the king, an investigation by the Guardian has revealed.
Cost of the crown is an investigation into royal wealth and finances. The series, published ahead of the coronation of King Charles III, is seeking to overcome centuries of secrecy to better understand how the royal family is funded, the extent to which individual members have profited from their public roles, and the dubious origins of some of their wealth. The Guardian believes it is in the public interest to clarify what can legitimately be called private wealth, what belongs to the British people, and what, as so often is the case, straddles the two.
The extraordinary extent of Charles’s footprint in this remote patch of Norfolk was discovered by an analysis of property titles in the Land Registry.
In Anmer, every house is owned by the Windsors. The queen’s purchase of the old school house in 2006 for £625,000 completed her ownership of the entire village. The Sandringham real estate portfolio was probably inherited by her eldest son last year.
Charles also personally owns the freehold for at least 37 commercial properties in the Sandringham area, including shops, a post office, social clubs, a medical centre and a pub. There is a church, a primary school and a nursery registered to him too.
Two grand royal houses
Close by is Sandringham House, which was bought by Queen Victoria for £225,000 in 1862 as a home for the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. His coat of arms still hangs above the door, alongside those of every monarch (and owner) since.
Two-metre chandeliers hang in the ballroom, horse memorabilia crowds many rooms, and the cup won for Edward at the Grand National in 1900 sits pride of place on the dining table. By the front door there are jockeys’ weighing-in scales, which, according to a public guide at the house, were used in the past to weigh party guests as they arrived and left, proving the hosts had been generous with their food.
William and Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales, live part-time in nearby Anmer Hall, a 10-bedroom manor with a heated outdoor swimming pool and a tennis court. Queen Elizabeth gave the house, which dates back to 1802, to the couple as a wedding present.
These days, the two grand houses are worth at least £45m together. Jonathan Handford, a managing director at the country house specialist estate agent Fine & Country, estimated that with its royal heritage, Sandringham House could sell for well over £100m. “The land alone that the buildings sit in could reach that figure. If it were to ever come up for sale, [the estate] is likely to sell for far in excess of that as its royal history will be a huge draw for super-rich buyers from around the world,” Handford said.
When Queen Elizabeth inherited Sandringham from her father, George VI, it was haemorrhaging money, according to the historian David McClure. Prince Philip stepped in, reducing staff numbers, knocking down parts of the building and, in 1977, opening up sections of the house to the paying public. A ticket to visit the house and gardens costs £23.
In the 1980s, after cutting back on staff at Sandringham, the royal family sold some of the properties that had been used to house them.
Robert Walden bought his house, an end terrace in Flitcham, from the queen in 1988 for £27,000, an above-average price due to the royal connection, he said. “You get the queen’s signature on the transfer,” he said.
Others who own privately in the area find they have unusual covenants attached to their freehold, such as restrictions on putting up fences in case they interfere with game birds, which are a key attraction of the estate for the royals.
In recent years, the royals have started to buy back Sandringham properties, including in Dersingham and Wolferton. One woman with knowledge of one of the houses bought by the Windsors said: “Somebody came down with a clipboard, just asking a few questions … and the next thing they know they get an offer of the asking price. And then they find out who’s made the offer … Apparently it was Prince Charles … He used to play there as a child.”
Many of the houses owned by the king are rented out to tenants. A three-bedroom detached house in Flitcham boasting a “beautiful rear garden” was recently advertised for £950 a month. Back in 2020, a two-bed semi-detached property with oil-fired central heating in Anmer was up for £750 a month.
Some of the king’s houses are offered as holiday lets. One – the four-bedroomed Garden House, which goes for £1,144 a week – is booked up until 2025.
Together, the properties, mostly let on short-term rolling contracts, could bring in more than £4.5m a year in rental income for the king. If they were to be sold, they could collectively be worth more than £75m, based on the sale values of similar properties in the area.
Farmland and commercial rentals
Between the many villages are acres of rolling countryside. Much of this too is owned by the Sandringham estate. There are some rather unusual plots, such as the back half of Jason Marple’s garden. But most of the land is profitable farmland, mostly arable.
The makeup of the farms was consolidated under Prince Philip into large, tenanted plots, which provide much better returns. These days, eight tenant farmers rent 4,000 hectares (9,800 acres). There are another 2,400 hectares managed directly by Sandringham Farms. Based on average valuations for the area, and taking the tenancies into account, the total farmland is worth in the region of £105m.
A constant supply of farming and environmental subsidies has helped to make the land more workable and brought in a steady supplementary income. The Sandringham estate has received £15.4m in subsidies since 2000, according to official figures.
A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said: “The grants that are received are open to all qualifying farmers and forestry operators in England and support enhancing biodiversity, food production, reducing carbon footprint and employment.”
Beyond the farmland and residential houses, Charles owns the freehold for at least 37 commercial properties. Some of these premises, such as the social club in Flitcham, are offered on a peppercorn rent of £100 a year. But others make the king a substantial profit. The accounts of Sandringham Apple Juice, a company that sells its products in the Sandringham House gift shop, show it has forthcoming lease payments of £18,000.
Taking into account the many rental properties, the farmland, commercial rentals and the grand mansions, Charles has inherited an estate worth between £250m and £390m, according to valuation experts.
To establish exactly what properties existed on the Sandringham estate, we went through titles in the Land Registry to create a database of the plots of land that make up the estate.
Searching for these land title plots on Who Owns Norfolk and the Land App allowed us to identify which were farmland, and the acreage of each plot. Satellite images from Google Earth helped to establish that these were probably arable farms.
We used these acreage figures, combined with figures published on the Sandringham Estate website, and used a conservatively low average price for arable land in Norfolk, factoring in areas that were tenanted, as the lease would affect any potential sale price.
We then dug down into the land plots we had identified and developed a list of 321 residential properties that name the king as the freehold title owner. We found estimated valuation figures for 284 of those properties on Zoopla. We then reduced the sum of those rental properties to reflect the fact they were tenanted, reducing them to a conservative 75% of the likely sale price.
A search of rental properties advertised on the Sandringham estate website, including on pages archived since 2019, revealed the rental prices of 36 of those properties. We used this data, combined with the estimated house value, to calculate the average percentage yield for the properties at 5.82%. We applied this against the total likely rental properties to come to our estimated figure for the king’s annual rental income.
We presented our findings to two land valuation experts, who provided detailed estimates on the value of these landholdings and properties.
The amount of subsidies received was gathered from freedom of information requests and online databases.
With all our Sandringham estate calculations, we have not included the premium that could be added by dint of the royal connection.
Despite the huge property portfolio, the Guardian could not find the company entity that handles the income from the Sandringham estate. It is the king’s name that appears on Land Registry titles, and the VAT number attached to products sold at Sandringham House is linked to the keeper of the privy purse, the manager of the king’s personal finances.
Tenants said it was the king’s name on their tenancy agreement, and their monthly rent is paid simply to the Sandringham estate. Flitcham Ltd, an entity often linked to the house, is a dormant company that does not file accounts.
Tom Sheils, who runs the Who Owns Norfolk blog and produced a public map of the Sandringham estate, said in response to the Guardian’s findings: “It’s public knowledge that the royal family is one of Norfolk’s major landowners, but … there is no easy way to find out exactly how many properties the king might own … [nor] how the land is held or anything else associated with its ownership.”
Residents’ perks and restrictions
Behind her blue door in Dersingham, Gwen Leary is content. She has lived in the same house for 23 years. Like many in the area, she is a royalist, and she enjoys the fact that the monarch is her private landlord.
She has ploughed her own money into the property over the years, including paying for an en suite shower in one bedroom. “I’m hoping that they appreciate all the money I’ve spent on the property,” she said.
The Guardian spoke to 21 other residents of the villages, and there were few complaints. Many described the king, and the Sandringham estate, as a good landlord who charged relatively low rents. There are additional perks, such as invitations to garden parties and Bonfire Night fireworks in the grounds of Sandringham House. During the pandemic, the estate even provided meals – including seared venison fillet in red wine jus – to all pension-aged residents.
Besides the blue doors, tenants do have to accept some odd restrictions written into the tenancy agreements. Caravans are allowed on site for only six weeks at a time. And the Sandringham estate website states: “We have a strict no cats policy.” This is probably to protect pheasant fledglings that are bred for the Sandringham shoot.
The king is selective in who he rents to. “Sandringham’s housing policy is to let properties as a primary residence, prioritising those who live and work locally,” the site states. “Properties are not let on a first come, first served basis, but rather on which prospective tenant is best suited to the property.”
Not everyone is totally happy. Mick Dye has lived in his cottage in Shernborne for decades. He claims he has been asking for repairs and improvements for years. The blue doors on the house are repainted every couple of years, but other, less visible things got forgotten, he said.
“We ain’t got any loft insulation, we’ve still got metal windows, we ain’t got a firewall [in the loft]. Lots of the things we haven’t got, we should have. Any other landlord would be had up for doing what they’re doing. But … you can’t take the queen to court,” he said.
In Dersingham, Theresa and Jim Hall love the home they have lived in since 1979 and are proud that the king’s name is on their tenancy agreement. “They are very good to us,” Theresa said. But the Windsors ruled that all the houses must retain their old, single-glazed windows, they claimed. “We’re on a hill, there’s the Wash out there and the wind just comes straight across,” Jim said.
A palace spokesperson said they would not comment on private tenancy agreements, but added: “There is an active and continuing programme of installation of double-glazed windows.” The spokesperson said they would not comment on valuations that they described as “speculative”.
Things could change now that the king is the official landlord. Charles began to take a more active role in the management of the estate in 2019, after his father stepped back. One of the first things he did was to end the farming of blackcurrants, which had been supplied to Ribena, as they could not be produced organically.
Further transformations could be on the horizon. According to a guide in Sandringham House, Charles has made another change since acceding to the throne: the horse-themed table mats have been replaced with pastoral scenes.
