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Earl Cadogan, billionaire steward of a 90-acre Chelsea estate who was clear-sighted in developing the area – obituary
He was chairman of Chelsea Football Club, had a passion for the turf and his best-known development was Duke of York Square, King’s Road
The 8th Earl Cadogan, who has died aged 86, was one of Britain’s richest men, thanks to his family’s ownership of vast swathes of south-west London.
Once described as “an unsmiling grandee with the physical proportions of a baronial barn door”, Cadogan presided over a 90-acre estate extending west from Sloane Street and Sloane Square and including some of Chelsea’s prime retail and residential properties.
The King’s Road, Cheyne Walk, Cheyne Gardens, Cadogan Square and Chelsea Square are among the estate’s most resonant addresses. It was once said that “if something doesn’t move in Chelsea, the family probably owns it.” There is also land in Scotland and Australia. In 2022 Cadogan Estates reported a property portfolio value of £5.1 billion.
The Cadogan Estate’s origins lay in the marriage, in 1717, of Charles Cadogan (Lord Cadogan of Oakley) to Elizabeth Sloane. Five years earlier Elizabeth’s father, the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane, had bought the Manor of Chelsea from Lord Cheyne for £17,800. On Sloane’s death in 1753, Elizabeth inherited the grander half of the Manor, and she acquired most of the rest on the death of her sister, Sarah Stanley, forming a total of 270 acres. Charles and Elizabeth’s son, also called Charles, was created Earl Cadogan in 1800.
It was the 5th Earl who created the red brick and stucco terraces that are familiar today. He held office under Benjamin Disraeli and later Lord Salisbury as Under-Secretary of State for War, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Privy Seal and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
Charles Gerald John Cadogan was born on March 24 1937, the only son of the 7th Earl Cadogan, MC, and his first wife, Primrose Lilian Yarde-Buller, younger daughter of the 3rd Lord Churston. Charles was a first cousin of the Aga Khan, whose mother Joan was Primrose Yarde-Buller’s sister.
Charles’s grandfather, the 6th Earl, had been a gambler and heavy drinker who had died an undischarged bankrupt in 1933, leaving his son to pick up the pieces.
The 7th Earl rose to the occasion. Although forced to sell off the family houses, Culford Hall, near Bury St Edmunds (which became a school), and Chelsea House in Cadogan Place North (demolished to be replaced by a block of flats), by 1976, after 43 years of good stewardship, he had paid off all his father’s debts. It was he who was responsible for the 220-bedroom Carlton Tower Hotel and the new Danish embassy building in Sloane Street.
Charles spent much of his childhood at Snaigow, the family’s sporting estate in Perthshire, where the rain used to cascade through the roof into the drawing room. He was sent to Eton, and after National Service with the Coldstream Guards worked from 1958 at the merchant bank Schroder Wagg, where he became personnel manager. One colleague remembered him as “a genial chap … didn’t do much work, but then none of us did in those days”.
In 1974 he left the City to take over running the family’s assets, although he did not succeed to the earldom until his father’s death in 1997. Initially he pursued a policy of diversification, into stock-market investments, Australian ranches, and even holiday camps. But after a review in the late 1980s, it was decided to concentrate on the estate’s assets in Chelsea. Some 55 per cent is commercial property and 45 per cent residential. There are more than 3,000 flats and houses, 300 shops, five churches and 500,000 sq ft of office space.
Over the previous two and a half centuries almost half the original estate had been sold off. Cadogan sought to reverse this. Under his aegis, the estate bought the freeholds to the Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square and Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge. More than £500 million was spent on new buildings, leases and developments in just two decades.
The most high-profile scheme was the £150 million redevelopment of the old barracks and sports ground at Duke of York Square on the King’s Road. The estate described this as the “largest and arguably most stylish shopping centre to open in London for decades”. Initially, at least, it was not universally popular with local residents, some of whom feared a “Chainstore Massacre” with the intrusion of supermarkets, mobile phone shops and Starbucks. But the estate countered that the aim was to attract “a mix of tenants”.
It was also decided to let the shops in Sloane Street on 10-year leases, rather than the British average of 15 to 25 years – a move designed to attract tenants who did not want restrictive and lengthy agreements. The estate also adopted annual index-linked rent rises, arguing that this offered tenants more certainty about their annual bills.
Like many landlords, Cadogan did not always enjoy harmonious relations with his tenants. In 1996 the Cadogan Estate Statutory Tenants’ Association was formed to oppose the estate’s practice of taking residents to court to enforce lease terms – “even on minor matters”, according to one member.
And in 2004 WH Smith complained that the estate had broken its tenancy agreement when the stationer was told to leave after more than 130 years in Sloane Square; but this could be seen as evidence of Lord Cadogan’s determination to take the area upmarket, as he was generally thought to have done with the Duke of York Square development, which today houses the Saatchi Gallery and a range of upscale shops, from Aesop to Partridges.
For its part, Cadogan Estates, in a tribute to the Earl on its website, maintained that he was “particularly enthusiastic about supporting those who were committed to the community or who had served with distinction in Kensington and Chelsea.
“Cut-price rentals for flats continue to be provided to nurses, teachers and police officers; he insisted on the provision of grace-and-favour accommodation for a myriad of deserving people including retired bishops, vicars and charity workers, so that they could see out their retirements peacefully, and rents are still frozen for the elderly on the estate.”
From time to time Lord Cadogan found himself preoccupied by less serious matters. In 1996, for example, he decided to permit topless sunbathing in Cadogan Square and the estate’s other private gardens, saying: “There was a bit of a craze of girls taking off practically everything, and we did have some complaints from some old nannies. But generally my feeling is that nude sunbathing is to be encouraged.”
Lord Cadogan, who was appointed KBE in 2012, had many outside interests. He was a racehorse owner, and between 1963 and 1982 was a director, and later chairman, of Chelsea FC. From 1962 to 1999 he was a director of Eagle Star. He was chairman of the Leukaemia Research Fund from 1985, and of the London Playing Fields Foundation from 2001. In 1996 he was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Greater London.
He married first, in 1963, Lady Philippa Wallop, daughter of the 9th Earl of Portsmouth; they had two sons and a daughter. His first wife died in 1984, and he married secondly, in 1989, Jennifer Rae, a former Jockey Club catering manager. That marriage was dissolved in 1994, and in the same year he married Dorothy Ann Shipsey, the former Matron of King Edward VII Hospital in Marylebone; she survives him, with his children Anna-Karina, William, and Edward, born in 1966, who becomes the 9th Earl Cadogan.
Earl Cadogan, born March 24 1937, died June 11 2023