Agatha Christie bought and sold homes like she was playing real-life Monopoly — and one of her favourites has come up for sale
In an Art Deco block in the heart of Chelsea, Agatha Christie kept a pied-à-terre for three decades where she wrote several of her most famous works. Today, it's up for sale.
'I swear nobody on earth had more homes than Agatha Christie,' read the message from one of my colleagues. The prompt? An email from the agents at Sandfords, who are selling the £1.95 million flat in Swan Court, Chelsea, that was for many years home to the Queen of Crime herself.
Agatha Christie owned her flat in Swan Court for 28 years. Now it's your turn.
I should say 'one of the homes of the Queen of Crime', for — as my colleague alluded to — Christie had many. Most famous and most picturesque of the lot is Greenway, the magnificent country pile sitting on a clifftop in Devon overlooking the River Dart a couple of miles upstream from Dartmouth and the English Channel.
Christie fell in love with the spot (as do many visitors to this part of Devon), calling it 'the loveliest place in the world'. She had grown up nearby, so when it came up for sale in 1937 — through Country Life, naturally — she and her then-husband Max Mallowan bought the place. This historic, 16th-century landmark, once home to Sir Walter Raleigh, became their much-loved base in Devon.
Agatha Christie's Greenway in Devon, advertised in Country Life in 1937 before Christie and her husband bought it.
Today, Greenway is in the hands of the National Trust and is a hugely popular place to come and find out more about the best-selling novelist of all time. (Only William Shakespeare and the authors of the Bible have sold more books.)
Yet while Greenway did make its way into Christie's fiction, it was very much the couple's holiday home rather than the place she created her stories. Much of the hard graft was done elsewhere, for Christie worked wherever she happened to be. One of the places where that work happened was Winterbrook House, on the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border in the town of Wallingford, which Christie bought a few years before picking up Greenway.
Agatha Christie pictured at her home at Winterbrook House in Wallingford in 1950.
Winterbrook, like Greenway, was also advertised in Country Life ahead of its sale to Christie and Mallowan; back then it was still in Berkshire rather than Oxfordshire. Wallingford was actually in Berkshire for 1,000 years before it the Oxfordshire boundary was redrawn by the Local Government Act 1972.
Winterbrook as it appeared in Country Life in 1930.
Christie and Mallowan spent a large chunk of their time at Winterbook, a home which they kept for the rest of their lives, as noted by the blue plaque on the house. Yet it still wasn't really the place that informed and nurtured her stories: as Christie makes fairly clear in her autobiography, she very much considered it Max's house. Mallowan was an archaeologist and historian who'd studied at Oxford University, and went on to become a fellow of All Souls College. This made, Wallingford, half an hour or so from Oxford, an ideal spot. Unlike Greenway, it's not a tourist destination, but a private home which came on to the market as recently as 2021. Once again, it made an appearance in Country Life at the time.
Winterbrook House came up for sale via Savills in 2021 with a price of £2.75 million.
While several of Christie's books and plays were worked on while she was at Wallingford, it was more a place of pleasant refuge, as historian Judy Dewey writes on agathachristie.com. While at Winterbook she went about her business as Mrs Mallowan, rather than the great crime writer Agatha Christie. She described it as 'a nice place' that had 'a poor railway service and was therefore not at all the sort of place people came to, either from Oxford or from London... we have been very happy here.'
Much of her inspiration came elsewhere, from New York to Istanbul to Iraq to the great country houses of Britain — and of course London, where Christie owned a string of homes, in all sorts of buildings. One was in the modernist icon that is the Isokon Building in Hampstead, where a flat was sold last year. Even more famous is her house at 58 Sheffield Terrace, Holland Park, where she had a dedicated writing room. It's here that she worked while writing some of her best-known works, including Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.
I say 'worked on' because Christie seems to have written bits here, there and everywhere. Some claim she wrote Murder on the Orient Express in a house on Campden Street, for example, a place that she apparently owned from 1930 to 1934. Clearing all this up is tricky, and even her autobiography isn't much help — not least because she mixed up several of the addresses and numbers.
Agatha Christie's house in Sheffield Terrace, London.
Earlier in her life, for example, Christie lived and worked in a house on Northwick Terrace in St John's Wood, and another at Cresswell Place, South Kensington. But many of the houses she bought were purely for fun, for investments, for development and renovation. The author admitted having 'a passion' for property, and referred several times to her 'plutocratic period', during which she bought and sold houses as casually as Premier League footballers buy Italian supercars. It was as close to real-life Monopoly as anything we've ever come across.
The current Agatha Christie flat for sale, 48 Swan Court, is not mentioned in her autobiography — but unlike many of the houses she owned, there's no doubt that she lived and worked there. Funnily enough, the evidence comes from another of her houses: Greenway, where the National Trust have preserved forwarding instructions from Christie to the Royal Mail, giving instructions about sending her post on from Devon to both Winterbrook and Swan Court.
Christie bought the flat in 1948 and is thought to have written Witness for the Prosecution while here, as well as a fair portion of The Mousetrap. The iconic play first hit the West End in 1951, and is still going today: it holds the record for the longest-running stage production anywhere in the world, and went past 30,000 performances just last year.
48 Swan Court was once two flats — hence the huge reception room.
What of Swan Court itself? For an author in need of a pied-à-terre it's pretty perfect. Sitting on Chelsea Manor street, just a few steps from the King's Road, this lovely old Art Deco building is a classic 1930s purpose-built apartment block.
Go to bed, dream of a plot for a best-selling novel, wake up, write it down, make millions.
The two-bedroom flat has a simple floorplan: two good-seize bedrooms bedrooms, one of which has plenty of storage and an en-suite bathroom, plus a further bathroom, modest kitchen, and a long reception room measuring over 32ft.
If that sounds big, it's for good reason: this home was originally two flats that were knocked together. The agents haven't been able to ascertain if it was Christie herself who had that work done. It certainly isn't unique: Margaret Thatcher lived in Swan Court in the 1950s (imagine them meeting in the corridors!), and that apartment also appears to have had the same treatment.
Both the building and the flat have been very well kept and refurbished over the years: there's a lift, CCTV, 24-hour porter and all the other things you'd expect of a £2 million home in this sought-after postcode, where service charges range from around £5,000 to £10,000 depending on the apartment.
It's a lot of money, of course. Might we suggest writing a few best-selling crime novels to cover the mortgage?
48 Swan Court is for sale through Sandfords — see more details.
https://londonist.com/2015/09/agatha-christie-s-london
https://100queensgate.com/blog/dame-agatha-christie/
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/agatha-christie/
