Architect drops eight places with £170m
Norman Foster has dropped eight places in the Sunday Times Rich List.
Once again he was the only architect to make the annual table of Britain’s wealthiest people.
His fortune of £170m is unchanged from last year but he was jostled down from joint 695th place to joint 703rd by the likes of racing driver Lewis Hamilton and Apple design guru Jonathan Ive.
Foster’s entry in the Rich List pointed out that he won the Stirling Prize last year for the Bloomberg building (client Michael Bloomberg is not listed) and that he described Brexit as “madness. It listed him as having homes in America, London, France and Switzerland. It added: “Profits at the company, set up by the Stockport-born entrepreneur in 1967, fell to £20.8m on lower turnover of £212.5m in 2017-18. The size of the stake held by Foster, 83, is no longer made public.”
Other key figures who made it into the Rich List, published this weekend, included plutocrats who give their cash – and thus their names – to help fund significant new buildings.
These include Len Blavatnik, at number 4 with $14.37bn. His donation was enough to rename Herzog & de Meuron’s Switch House at Tate Modern after himself.
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The Garfield Weston family, whose family trust backed Wilkinson Eyre’s Weston Library for the Bodleian in Oxford, came 13th with £10.5bn.
Hans Rausing, who has shelled out to support William Matthews’ Tintagel Bridge in Cornwall and David Chipperfield’s RA art school, came in at number 16 with £9.606bn.
Dame Theresa Sackler and family – whose name is on Zaha Hadid’s Serpentine extension, a Haworth Tompkins RCA building in Battersea, John Pawson’s bridge at Kew Gardens, Fosters’ extension at the Royal Academy and Amanda Levete’s courtyard at the V&A among others – is at number 50 with £3bn. But their name will not now adorn Jamie Fobert’s National Portrait Gallery project after anger erupted over the family’s connection to the opioids scandal.
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Landowner the Duke of Westminster, and the wider Grosvenor family, came 14th with £10.1bn. The family owns 300 acres in Mayfair and Belgravia and was behind KPF’s £500m plans for the Old Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey which were refused planning earlier this year on the grounds they didn’t contain enough affordable housing.
Their neighbours, the Cadogan family, who own much of Kensington and Chelsea, were 20th with £6.85bn. The Howard de Walden family, which owns large tracts of Marylebone, came in at 32nd place with £4.19bn.
Heineken chief Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho – whose daughter turned RSHP’s old Hammersmith headquarters into a café and wellness centre – dropped one spot to seventh place, despite increasing their fortune by £900m to £12bn.
Fawn and India Rose James – who inherited Soho Estates from their grandfather, porn baron Paul Raymond, and are building Soda Studios’ Boulevard Theatre on the site of the Raymond Revuebar – nabbed 200th place with a £708m fortune.
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