Duke of Westminster: the London property baron born with ‘longest silver spoon’
The Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, was famously described by his father as being “born with the longest silver spoon anyone can have”.
Grosvenor, 32, owns more than 300 acres of some of London’s fanciest properties in Mayfair and Belgravia as part of a global, family-owned property empire valued at £9.5bn, making him the third richest person in the UK and, according to Tatler – until this weekend – the country’s “most eligible bachelor”.
Grosvenor, who is close friends with Prince William and godfather to Prince George, is officially off the market after announcing his engagement to his girlfriend, Olivia Henson, who works for the London-based ethical food company Belazu.
The silver spoon really is long. The family fortune dates back to Norman times, when the king’s head huntsman or “gros veneur” Hugh Lupus was granted huge swathes of land in Cheshire. It led Hugh Grosvenor’s father, Gerald, the sixth Duke of Westminster who died in 2016, to joke that his top piece of advice to budding entrepreneurs was “to have an ancestor who was good friends with William the Conqueror”.
However, the bulk of the fortune is actually the result of an exceedingly fortuitous marriage in 1677 when Sir Thomas Grosvenor wed 12-year-old Mary Davies, the heiress of a City of London scrivener. Her dowry included 500 acres of boggy swampland and meadows to the west of what was then the boundary of London.
As the city expanded that land became hugely valuable and the Grosvenor family developed it into what are now some of the most exclusive neighbourhoods including Mayfair, Pimlico and Belgravia.
“In the process of time Mary Davies’s inheritance was developed for building, and the Grosvenors became the richest urban landlords in the country, the
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