Witanhurst

Witanhurst is a large Grade II listed early 20th-century Georgian Revival mansion located on 5 acres (2.0 ha) in Highgate, North-West London. The house has had several prominent owners since being rebuilt by the soap magnate Sir Arthur Crosfield, and after several decades of increasing dilapidation is currently undergoing refurbishment after its 2008 sale to an offshore company owned by the family of the Russian businessman Andrey Guryev.

The original estate, dating from 1774, was known as Parkfield. The current house, built between 1913 and 1920, was designed by architect George Hubbard for soap magnate Sir Arthur Crosfield on an 11-acre (4.5 ha) site. The mansion is Grade-II* listed, meaning it has been judged to be of national historic or architectural interest. English Heritage has in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century placed the property on its Buildings at Risk Register.

Paul Crosfield sold Witanhurst to the property developer Lionel Green in 1970, but it was possessed by banks shortly after, and owned by various other property developers for the next fifteen years. Various schemes for redeveloping Witanhurst were proposed and rejected by Camden council during this period including turning the house into a hotel or apartments, and various pieces of land from Witanhurst's large estate were sold. In 1976 Witanhurst was bought by a Kuwati, a Mr. Al-Hasouwy, for £1.3 million, who subsequently spent £500,000 developing the property. It was put up for sale in 1977 for £7 million with planning permission for 53 houses. The house was subsequently sold by Noble Investments, a shell company believed to have been linked to the Kuwaiti al-Hasawi family, to Mounir Developments, a company registered in the tax haven of Panama. The ultimate beneficial owners of Mounir Developments was eventually revealed in a court case to be a relation of the Assad family, the ruling family of Syria, that were then in exile in England. Somar al-Assad, a cousin of the then Syrian president Bashar al-Assad stated in a court case that he had not slept at Witanhurst in the previous eight years of ownership by a trust connected to the family.

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