The Bollywood billionaires of Notting Hill
Plus: How many cyclists have been fined for speeding in a London park and why Sadiq Khan's opportunity to return to parliament is vanishing.
We’ve been dodging the hail this week while working on a series of exclusive investigations to run over the coming weeks.
Today we’ve got a tale of the strange world of London’s super-rich. It’s about a Notting Hill property dispute involving a Bollywood star, her billionaire husband, plans for a giant refurbishment, and whether they are turning a neighbouring block of flats into “servants’ quarters”.
Scroll down to read that.
Burnham of Brockwell Park
We’re trying to avoid politics after a few weeks of election coverage. But it’s hard not to notice that former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham, currently on long-term loan to the north as mayor of Greater Manchester, is doing his best to return to parliament, become prime minister, and once again live in the capital.
He told London Centric last year that “The London I moved to in the 90s is not the London of today”. That said, he also talked fondly of living on Regent Road opposite Brockwell Park lido, drinking in The Commercial pub by Herne Hill station, and getting fish and chips from Olley’s.
Burnham will have to resign as mayor if he’s elected as an MP, due to restrictions on double-jobbing. But, due to a quirk in the law, there is no such restriction on a mayor of London also being an MP – a loophole that Boris Johnson happily exploited.
That loophole will close when a new piece of legislation comes into effect in the coming months, but until then there’s little to stop an ambitious London mayor from finding a parliamentary seat. Sadiq Khan, your window to cause chaos is closing fast.
How many cyclists have been fined for speeding in London’s parks?
Last year London Centric learned that Wandsworth council had started using a speed gun on cyclists exceeding 12mph on Tooting Common, in a story that quickly went around the world. Now thanks to a Freedom of Information request by reader Justin Cash, we’ve learned the council fined a sum total of… 10 cyclists in this manner, clocking them at speeds between 16 and 18 mph. Six cyclists paid the £50 fine immediately, while four attempted to fight it. In the same year the council received 134 complaints about the speed of cyclists.
There are no speed limits for bicycles on public roads. Some parks, such as Tooting Common, have historic by-laws imposing a limit, although these are rarely enforced given few cyclists have a speedometer. In the same month that cyclists were being fined for going too fast across the south London park, an 11-year-old girl was hit by a car driver on a neighbouring road and later died.
How do you shoplift from B&Q if the trolley has been shoplifted?
The next time you need a few heavy DIY supplies from a London B&Q you might find yourself dragging them round the store. The home improvement store has been withdrawing its large flatbed metal trolleys from some London stores because, according to staff members, they are “forever being stolen for scrap”.
One B&Q employee explained that “it’s normally people in a van” but “sometimes it’s just individuals doing it”. Another staff member told us that whole replacement shipments of the trolleys have been stolen overnight shortly after arriving and it seems the company has decided it is losing too much money on them.
An employee at the Old Kent Road branch said they didn’t bother reporting the thefts because – in a sentence that will be familiar to London Centric readers from stories about “low-level” crime in the capital – “there’s nothing police can do”. B&Q didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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The billionaires next door: “We’re going from living in a community to living in servants’ quarters”
By Polly Smythe and Jim Waterson
When the actor Sonam Kapoor and her billionaire husband Anand Ahuja bought a giant Notting Hill mansion just off Ladbroke Grove for £21m in 2023, the neighbours didn’t see any major cause for concern. Wealthy buyers are common in this corner of west London, where some of the richest inhabitants live alongside families who have been in the area since long before local property prices went stratospheric.
Kapoor and Ahuja’s company spent years developing plans for a complete rebuild of the mansion, which involves demolishing everything aside from the external walls. The proposal also features a giant basement and swimming pool, which would be disruptive but not particularly unusual for the area.
Then the residents of Hillcrest, a 1960s block of flats next to the mansion on Ladbroke Grove, started noticing something strange. Their new neighbours were expanding into their building. One by one, a separate company with Kapoor and Ahuja as directors began buying up flats in the neighbouring block with the apparent intention of using them to house their staff.
“We’re going from living in a community to living in servants’ quarters,” one resident complained to London Centric.
Over the last three years Kapoor and Ahuja’s company has spent more than £4m buying five of the 23 flats in Hillcrest, which abuts the mansion they plan to redevelop. It has also managed to purchase all of the Hillcrest garages to house the family’s car fleet.
In recent months the remaining residents in Hillcrest have taken to sending legal letters to the couple in a bid to probe what they perceive as the continued conversion of their building from a series of permanent homes into transitory staff quarters for a billionaire family’s employees – a characterisation that the family strongly disputes. The residents also wanted to know whether the purchases count as a potential breach of the apartment building’s leases, which require the properties to be used by permanent residents.
At first this seemed to be an intriguing but straightforward story about the changing face of the capital’s high-end property market and how, with Russian investment collapsing, ultra-wealthy Indians are among those stepping into the gap.
Then things took a strange turn. The billionaire couple’s representatives allegedly told the neighbours that, if London Centric published this article, they would turn the newly acquired flats into “social housing”. The residents understood this as a warning: If you create negative headlines for us, we’ll change the social make-up of your building.
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