Page 26 Daily Mail, Thursday, August 1, 2019
life
OXFORD SPIRES AND A SPOUSE
BORIS spent three years studying Classics
at Balliol College, Oxford, where he met his
first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen.
BORIS THE LODGER
HIRED by The Times as a trainee reporter,
Boris was seconded for three months in 1987
to Wolverhampton’s Express & Star news-
paper. He is reported to have lodged with a
woman called Brenda on Dimmock Street
in Parkfields near Bilston.
The experience led him to say that local
Labour politicians’ indifference to the damp
in people’s houses made him realise he was a
Tory. The Times’s then foreign editor, George
Brock, recalls him as ‘an immediately striking
figure with red braces and albino hair’.
BORIS JOHNSON
finally moved into
Downing Street
this week.
The domestic
arrangements of
our peripatetic
PM have been
complicated to
say the least —
booted out of his
marital home and
spending his time
between girlfriend
Carrie Symonds’s
flat and houses
lent by friends.
But wanderlust
has been a regular
feature of his life
— since the age
of 15, he has
moved 32 times.
Here, DAVID WILKES
maps the many
homes of Boris...TRANSATLANTIC CROSSINGS
IN SEPTEMBER 1964, the family rented a property in
Oxford while Boris’s artist mum Charlotte resumed her
English degree at the university. In 1968, they went to
live in Washington DC, where Stanley worked for the
World Bank, moving again to New York. At one point,
they lived on an island in Connecticut.BoJo’s
ABODES
BABES IN (ST JOHN’S) WOOD
NOW joined by siblings Rachel and Leo, Boris
returned to London in 1969. Initially, the family
lodged with Charlotte’s parents, lawyer Sir James
Fawcett and his wife, Frances, in Cavendish Avenue,
one of the grandest addresses in St John’s Wood
(above). The family moved to a white stucco house
in chi-chi Little Venice (right). Similar six-bed terrace
houses overlooking the canal now cost £8 million.FIRST HOME:
NEW YORK
BORIS was born
in June 1964 in
Manhattan, where
his father, Stanley,
studied economics
at Columbia Uni-
versity. The family
home was a loft
apartment oppo-
site artist Andy
Warhol’s haunt,
the funky Chelsea
Hotel on West 23rd
St. ‘It contained
a yellow, out-of-
tune piano with
the motto “Vive
La Fun!” painted
glaringly on its lid,’
recalled Stanley.FINAL MARITAL HOME
IN 2009, the family moved to their
third Islington home — a Grade II-
listed, five-storey Georgian town-
house overlooking Regent’s Canal.
They bought it for £2.3million.
Following Boris and Marina’s
split, it’s now for sale for £3.75 mil-
lion and ‘under offer’, according to
estate agents. With his divorce still
pending, Boris is likely to get a
£700,000 windfall from the sale.A GRACE-AND-FAVOUR FLAT
FOLLOWING the EU referendum in 2016, Boris was made Foreign
Secretary and moved into One Carlton Gardens. After he quit over
Brexit delays, he was reluctant to leave and was accused of staying
an extra two weeks because he wanted to keep raking in money
from renting out his Islington home. He denied the charge.BUCOLIC BLISS
BORIS and Marina
bought a four-bedroom
detached house near
Thame, Oxfordshire,
for £640,000 in 2003.
They still own it and
it’s worth £1,276,000,
according to property
website Zoopla.As he settles into No 10, how the PM’s
made it to the top of the property ladder
— via a hip New York apartment and, er...
a not-so-trendy Wolverhampton terrace!
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