John Griffin is notoriously determined. The 81-year-old left school at 15 with no qualifications, survived tuberculosis as a child and is now worth hundreds of millions of pounds after founding the taxi giant Addison Lee. Knighted last December, the father of two is used to getting what he wants.
However, there is one hurdle Griffin can’t seem to overcome: he can’t offload his grade I listed mansion opposite Regent’s Park. It has been on the market since 2022.
“In this room, a gentleman sat there and made an offer which was highly acceptable. And I stood up with him and we shook hands. What happened next? Nothing. It was most disappointing,” Griffin says, gesturing at a chair in his study, as he recounts one galling failed deal to sell the 6,730 sq ft end-of-terrace property a year ago.
“This chap, I honestly can’t believe a human being would break the agreement he made. He shook my hand. We were let down. There were six of us in the room.”
Some observers may say that Griffin ought to have woken up and smelt the rather fragrant flowers across the road from his home in northwest London. The house, located at the end of Hanover Terrace, and built by the Buckingham Palace architect John Nash in 1822, has languished on the market for £29 million since November 2022 — although in February it was reduced to £27 million and three weeks ago, Griffin dropped the price again, to £22.5 million.
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Rather than drastically reducing it earlier, Griffin, who bought the six-bedroom, eight-bathroom home in 2014 with his wife, Rita, after selling Addison Lee for £300 million, initially decided to try a different selling tactic.
In June last year United Kingdom Sotheby’s International Realty, their estate agency, brought in a feng shui master to reposition the interior of the mansion to make it more attractive for sale — a process that was shown in the Channel 4 documentary Britain’s Most Expensive Houses.
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As we stand in his lateral first-floor double reception room, which has a view of the famous park beyond, I ask Griffin if the positioning of his furniture is still based on feng shui.
“I don’t know. It’s all bullshit really,” he replies with a mixture of bluntness and charm.
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At this point Lee Greenfield, a senior director at Sotheby’s International Realty, who is standing alongside us, jumps in: “Well to be honest, it’s something that was obviously useful at the time. And if you’re into that, then it would definitely be very helpful. But I can’t comment because it was the past regime — nothing to do with us.”
This isn’t the only time during the interview that Greenfield refers to his own estate agency as “the past regime” — a curious figure of speech, on the face of it. However, in the case of Sotheby’s, it makes sense. Last year the agency, which had a reputation for being somewhat understated and glacial in its approach, was taken over by George Azar, a no-nonsense banker who has turned the business upside down. Greenfield, who joined in October, is one of the new recruits alongside “super agents” Claire Reynolds, Marcus O’Brien and Becky Fatemi, who are now working to a US-style commission model.
It is this new-look Sotheby’s that advised Griffin to slash his home’s original asking price by £6.5 million. It was a ruthless recommendation — the £22.5 million asking price isn’t much more than the £21 million that he paid for the house.
Greenfield says: “We took a general consensus of the marketplace. If you want to sell something, you have to be aligned with market conditions and you have to be proactive. And we took the decision that the guide price of £22.5 million is a little bit more palatable.”
Whatever the debate over the price, Griffin is at pains to tell me how his attempt to try to sell the house has left him deeply disillusioned with the way the selling process works — addressing this will be his latest campaign.
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The entrepreneur, who is now chair of the careers mentoring charity Finito, speaks bitterly of window-shoppers looking around his home discourteously, while others expressed an interest but then vanished into thin air.
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Griffin claims that any agreement to exchange on a property should be legally binding, like in Scotland, where accepted offers carry legal and financial weight after solicitors exchange documents called missives. As a result, gazumping is highly unusual north of the border.
“I am a great advocate of that, I really think that’s what we should be doing,” he says.
“We’ve got to look at the whole question of buying and selling. The way the system works now, people are wasting my time, they’re wasting everyone’s time — they’re even wasting his time,” he adds, pointing at Greenfield. “He [Greenfield] has come here today, and we’ve seen him four or five times, but you know really he’s a victim too.”
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So why, I ask, is Griffin trying to sell at all? He explains that since the pandemic he and his wife have been mostly living in a house they bought in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, which is closer to their son Liam, who bought back Addison Lee in 2020 and is now its chief executive, and their other son, Kieran. A grandson, who is at university in Cambridge, regularly commutes back to Potters Bar too.
Among several highlights of the Hanover Terrace house, Griffin tells me, is an elegant ground-floor dining room with double-height ceilings looking over Regent’s Park. This is the first room we visit. On a windowsill I spot a framed photograph of Griffin with David Cameron, which was taken when the former prime minister “popped in for tea”. Griffin is one of the Conservative Party’s biggest donors, having given £4.08 million between 2013 and 2019. He is an admirer of Cameron, but tells me he became disillusioned with the performance of Boris Johnson, and says the party has gone “tits up” in recent years.
“I was thinking of having a dinner here [for leading Conservative supporters], but Cameron said: ‘Don’t do that, they’re not worth it,’ ” Griffin jokes. “This is one of the great rooms of London, after all.”
Another highlight is the airy downstairs kitchen that leads out to a private walled garden, at the end of which is a self-contained mews house containing a gym. Greenfield says the mews house would be worth several million if it was sold on its own.
All the rooms are spacious, particularly the master suite, which takes up almost an entire floor on its own, and the double reception room. The place looks well maintained, even if the decor is a little tired in places. Intricate cornicing and period fireplaces add character. One slight drawback is that there is no lift, a de rigeur feature in prime properties with several storeys — Griffin’s home has five.
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Sotheby’s stresses it’s the prestige location that makes this a marquee property. The views are among the finest in London. Among Griffin’s neighbours on Hanover Terrace is Damien Hirst, Britain’s richest artist, who reportedly paid £40 million for his property four years ago, but is still making improvements, including a yoga room and swimming pool. “These houses were built to be seen — we want to be seen, and we want to see,” Griffin says, looking out from the reception room balcony towards Regent’s Park.
As I chat to Greenfield just outside the property, the area’s appeal to a certain type of demographic is underlined when Daniel Daggers, a super-prime estate agent who is starring in Buying London, Britain’s answer to the US luxury property TV show Selling Sunset, strolls by and shakes Griffin’s hand.
So who would buy such a house? Greenfield says he anticipates buyers of the property will be a family who live here permanently rather than occasional residents, but that the prestige location may appeal to British and foreign buyers alike. “You could have an English or European family here. You could have a Chinese buyer, you could have an Indian buyer that wants to buy [into] its heritage. There’s a big audience. This is a family house — I don’t think this is going to be a pied-à-terre.”
If the price is now right, then Britain’s self-made minicab tycoon will soon be making another big sale, a decade after his previous big payday. But, unlike last year, you can be sure he won’t be turning to feng shui to do it.
John Griffin’s mansion on Hanover Terrace is for sale at £22.5 million, sothebysrealty.co.uk
