Billionaire closes main road in South Kensington for gardening work
Richard Caring, the billionaire owner of the celebrity hotspot restaurant the Ivy and private members’ club Annabel’s, has won permission to close a main road in South Kensington, central London, in order to have dozens of trees planted in the grounds of his £40m mansion.
Caring, who has built up an estimated personal fortune of more than £1bn from his clubs and restaurants empire, which also includes the Sexy Fish in Mayfair, secured permission from the council to close part of Onslow Square for two weeks in order to install a crane to carry the mature trees over a row of neighbouring terraced houses.
David Erb, who lives on Onslow Square in a property overlooking Caring’s mansion, said it was outrageous that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was “acquiescing to the whims of a billionaire who wants a nice garden”.
“It is absolutely wrong that a single man, with a huge fortune is able to disrupt the lives of thousands of people,” Erb, a software developer, told the Guardian as one of the trees, estimated to weigh more than five tonnes, was lifted over his home. “They often close off the pavement as well and it’s beginning to feel a bit like we live behind a barricade.”
The road closure is the latest chapter in a five-year battle between Caring and some of the approximately 500 people who live in properties adjacent to his Park House mansion.
Designs for the house, which replaces a 19th-century cottage previously owned by the German industrialist heir Gert-Rudolf Flick, feature a large two-storey basement.
The basement alone contains a swimming pool (that can be converted into a ballroom), a beauty treatment room, steam room and store for summer clothes, according to plans filed with the council.
The council has
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