When Madonna describes a beachside town as her “idea of heaven”, one immediately pictures a beautiful location that caters to the super-rich – the squares of St Tropez in early summer, perhaps, or the hidden coves of Capri that are accessible only by boat. What one doesn’t imagine is the stony shoreline, grey waves and pebble-dashed houses of Margate, the supposed jewel of the Kent coastline.
And yet we should be grateful that – at a time when the British people have arguably never had a more negative view of their country – Madonna, 67, is heaping praise on our beleaguered little island. Earlier this year, she spoke about her love of Margate and the artistic community that has sprung up there, saying: “The whole town seems to be inhabited and energised by creativity. Whenever I go there, I feel like I’ve entered a dream.”
Happily, she is now based a mere two hours from this earthly paradise. An article from Interview Magazine released this week made it clear that the pop goddess – who has properties in New York City, the Hamptons, Los Angeles, Portugal and London – appears to have shifted her base from Manhattan to Marylebone.
During the interview, which took place in London near the Georgian house she now shares with her adopted twin daughters, Stella and Estere, Madonna said: “I moved here because I wanted to work with [the musician and DJ] Stuart [Price] non-stop, and not keep flying back and forth. We love football in this house. We are Chelsea fans and it’s a lot easier to go to games if you live in London.”
Later, she added: “I have to figure out the schools. I have to find out what I’m going to do with my time. Who am I going to work with? Who’s my community? Constantly staying out of my comfort zone and not sinking into comfort keeps me feeling alive. I’m like a gypsy.”
A gypsy who owns a 10-bedroom house just north of Hyde Park, that is. Madonna first purchased the house on Great Cumberland Place with Guy Ritchie, her ex-husband, in 2000 – and then, in 2007, bought the adjoining property and converted it into a megapad that she retained after their divorce a year later.
It is a part of London that has always been popular with the international elite. “Marylebone feels more like a village,” says Chrissie Fairweather, the head of residential sales at Robert Irving Burns. “What celebrity buyers most like is that it feels more relaxed and understated than other flashier pockets of central London. The streets are quiet – they can pop out for a coffee without attracting any attention – but at the same time, Soho and Theatreland are just a stone’s throw away.”
Madonna’s daughters, meanwhile, who are 13, are said to be huge football fans and reportedly now play for the Tottenham Hotspur under-14s women’s academy. In a slight change of pace from the north London football club, they are rumoured to be attending Cheltenham Ladies’ College, an elite all-girls boarding school, in September.
While Madge was never going to end up in a terraced house in Zone 4 with kids at the local comprehensive, all this still feels slightly surprising, mostly because she is going against the grain of her own multimillionaire class. House prices in central London are tumbling as the ultra-rich abandon the British capital en masse for more tax-friendly cities like Milan and Dubai, while our public schools are losing their lustre after VAT raids and an influx of international students. And then there are the widespread concerns about crime and antisocial behaviour under Sadiq Khan.
Madonna, however, is enamoured by it all.
Of course, it’s not her first rodeo on the sceptered isle. After she met Ritchie in 1998, the music icon started spending significant amounts of time in the UK, later saying: “I moved for love. I never thought for a million years I’d live in London. I quite disliked the place.” The couple married in Scotland in 2000 and, in 2002, just after their son was born, made Marylebone their base alongside a 1,000-acre country estate in Wiltshire.
Quickly, she started to change her mind about Britain. “The last thing I thought I would do is marry some laddish, shooting, pub-going nature lover,” she said in an interview at the time. “And the last thing he thought he was going to do was marry some cheeky girl from the Midwest who doesn’t take no for an answer. But now I love England and want to be here and not in America. I see England as my home.”
The tabloids, meanwhile, had a field day reporting on her new “lady of the manor” persona, which suddenly bore more of a resemblance to a Jilly Cooper character than the Madonna we used to know: There were shooting weekends, a quasi-English accent, Barbours, gilets and flat-caps galore. She and her children featured in a 17-page Vogue spread called “Like a Duchess”, and she increasingly embedded herself in British culture, taking up acting in the West End, being awarded her own official Scottish tartan and buying a pub in Fitzrovia with Ritchie.
Of course, not everything was perfect. Over the years, Madonna complained about the local work culture – saying workers take “bank holidays every minute” and demand weeks of paid holiday – as well as NHS hospitals, describing them as “old and Victorian”. Amusingly, she also disliked her British nickname, saying: “That’s one of the reasons I left England – so I don’t have to hear the word ‘Madge’ anymore”.
Still, when she moved her base back to New York after her 2008 divorce, she is said to have missed the UK. As the saying goes, there is “none so pious as the new convert”, and over the years, Madonna managed to stay in touch with all aspects of British culture that Britons themselves find uncomfortable. Few British celebrities, for example, would openly talk about their mansions in Marylebone or their thoughts on expensive boarding schools for fear of sounding elitist, but as a foreigner, Madonna seems to harbour no such worries.
As for the currently unsubstantiated reports that she is looking at Cheltenham Ladies’ College for her daughters (where the principal is Malawian-born, just like the twins) – it is not the first time Madonna has admired the £68,000-a-year school, which she is said to have put her older daughter’s name down for decades ago. In the end, Lourdes, 29, was largely educated in the US, but her son, Rocco, 25, attended a private arts school in Hampstead and continues to live in London today (and speaks with an English accent).
Madonna is also not alone among the American expat contingent in appreciating the boarding schools that most Britons can either no longer afford or no longer want to send their children to because they fear the culture has changed.
“Sending children off to board before age 14 or 15 is extremely rare [for Americans]. But it turned out to be a superlative experience for our sporty, social son,” says Ashley Baker, a journalist and former New Yorker who swapped Manhattan for Kensington a few years ago and chose to send her child to a famous British prep school. “He is now in his last few weeks there, and we can’t imagine a finer education for him – a holistic mix of academics, sport, the arts and pastoral care.”
Will Orr-Ewing, the founder of Keystone Tutors, who works with international families to place children in British private schools, adds that American celebrities are often drawn to the UK for education.
“Cheltenham is a beautiful school nestled near the Cotswolds – one of the most beautiful places on earth – but our schools do have distinctive strengths beyond that,” he says. “At their best, they are civil, intelligent, gentle places with supremely qualified teachers that stand in contrast to the ‘Big Little Lies’-esque intensity of a lot of elite schools in LA and New York. Their demographics are broader, too, with families coming from all over the world rather than just wealthy Americans.”
In many ways, it is a welcome relief that Madonna is willing to champion the best of British now that so many of her countryfolk are determined to write us off. The US press is currently attacking Britain from all sides, with the Left-leaning Atlantic recently publishing a disparaging cover story titled, “How Britain became as poor as Mississippi”. Additionally, commenters on the Right regularly describe London as a cesspit of crime and illegal migration.
Madonna seems immune to all of this – even if her reasons for loving the UK sometimes feel more closely aligned with a Richard Curtis film than a realistic version of 21st-century Britain. Even her less “quaint” preferences – football clubs and dance-music DJs – hark back to a version of Britain that felt culturally ascendant in the 1990s, rather than today’s post-Brexit nation with its sluggish economy and nightlife squeezed by rents and regulation.
But maybe we’re being too harsh on ourselves. “From our perspective, it’s a wonderful country that has an incredible past and a very bright future – even if the present is a bit rocky,” says Baker. For all Britain’s anxieties and self-doubt, Madonna too sees it as a place worth crossing the Atlantic for, with a Riviera that puts Italy and France’s in the shade, a superlative education system, and a thriving arts, music and football culture.
Lucky us, I suppose.