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Look inside: Terry Wogan's £3.75m home with tennis court, swimming pool, croquet lawn and orchard

Look inside: Terry Wogan's £3.75m home with tennis court, swimming pool, croquet lawn and orchard

Irish Times18-07-2025
The former Buckinghamshire home of the late, renowned
BBC
broadcaster
Terry Wogan
and his late wife, Helen, has been put up for sale. Hitcham Close in the village of Taplow, near Maidenhead in England, is on the market through joint agents
Savills Residential & Country Agency
and Bovingdons at a guide price of €4.33 million (Stg£3.75 million).
Described by the selling agent as a 'prominent Edwardian home', the house's key features include seven bedrooms all of which have views of its gardens and grounds, five reception rooms, a kitchen/breakfastroom, pantry and utility/bootroom, a tennis court, heated swimming pool, walled garden, croquet lawn and an orchard. The property, which the radio and TV presenter acquired with his wife in 1975, sits on a substantial 2.84-acre site behind wrought-iron gates in a private setting with views to Windsor Castle.
Wogan, who was given an honorary knighthood for his services to broadcasting by Britain's late
Queen Elizabeth
in 2005, forged strong links to his adopted Buckinghamshire over the decades when he and his family lived there. From 2007, he served as deputy lieutenant of the county, a role which saw him assisting the lord lieutenant in their duties as the queen's official local representative.
Following Wogan's death
at the age of 77 in 2016, lord lieutenant Henry Aubrey-Fletcher spoke of the Irish broadcaster's work in the county.
READ MORE
Entrance hall
Livingroom
Diningroom
Study
Kitchen
He said: 'He was true to his word. Despite his busy broadcasting schedule Terry frequently undertook citizenship ceremonies, welcoming people from other countries just as he, himself, had been welcomed to these shores from Ireland.'
In comments published in local newspaper, The Bucks Herald, Wogan's youngest son, Mark, remembered the family's time together in Hitcham Close.
'We're a close family, so the kitchen was central to everything,' Mark said.
'Mum was a fantastic cook. The welcome was always warm and the food plentiful.
'My parents were great hosts and had a close group of good friends that would regularly be over for dinners.
'We'd also have some lovely long lunches on the terrace overlooking mum's beloved garden. It's a thing of beauty.'
Landing
Bedroom
Bedroom
Bathroom
Bathroom
Lawn to rear
Lawn
Landscaped lawn area
Tennis court
Tennis court
According to Hugh Maconochie of selling agent Savills, Hitcham Close 'exudes charm and has clearly been a wonderful family home for many years'.
'The garden views are truly exceptional, with Windsor Castle beautifully framed by thoughtfully positioned planting, creating a picturesque and memorable outlook,' Maconochie said.
Terry Wogan was a regular presenter on BBC Radio from 1969 until his death in 2016. His Radio 2 breakfast show, Wake up to Wogan, was hugely successful, attracting an average audience of about eight million listeners between 1993 and his semi-retirement in 2009.
[
Terry Wogan interview: 'I'm a child of the Pale. I think I was born to succeed here'
Opens in new window
]
In terms of his television career, Wogan had a number of notable successes. These included Wogan, the thrice-weekly chatshow that he hosted on BBC One from 1984-1991, his time at the helm of the popular Blankety Blank quizshow, and Come Dancing, the original forerunner to today's ballroom dancing behemoth, Strictly Come Dancing.
He presented the BBC's coverage of the
Eurovision Song Contest
for many years. His proudest achievement, however, was Children in Need, the annual fundraising telethon he started in 1980, and which has raised hundreds of millions since.
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A smarter life? Meet the Gen-Zers who are switching off their smartphones
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Photograph: Tom Honan In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores how smartphones fuel insecurity and encourage constant social comparison among young people. Haidt believes great structural strides must be taken – by placing responsibility on governments and technology companies – to protect young people from their smartphones. Many Irish professionals working in education and mental health agree. 'It's causing mayhem in our school and I'm sure in lots of other schools that are not discussing it because we're caught between a rock and a hard place because of confidentiality,' says Mary*, a primary schoolteacher in Munster. 'We've seen first-hand the impact it's having on very young children after Holy Communion when they're being given access to mobile phones. It's impacting their mental health, their social interactions. 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Rachel Harper, principal of St Patrick's National School in Greystones, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Alan Betson For Harper, who is on the HSE Therapeutic Wellbeing Pilot project steering group, it's vital to normalise such conversations. 'All of us working together, that's how we're going to get change. There have to be a lot more restrictions with the tech companies themselves.' For now, the change has to come from within. Eighteen-year-old Nugent has a variety of tools to ensure he doesn't idle away his days on social media. 'I had Minimalist Phone from the start of third year,' he says. 'I deleted it and re-downloaded it. I've had it now without deleting it for maybe a year and a half.' Minimalist Phone is an app that helps users to navigate social media in a mindful way. 'It changes your phone screen so you have to search for apps if you want to go into them,' he says. 'Before opening certain apps, you can get a timer and you have to wait for a bit before opening the app. I also got an app called NoScroll – you can block certain websites. You can block YouTube shorts in YouTube – that solved that issue for me: a lot of the things posted there are just TikToks, posted in YouTube.' [ Excessive use of social media creating generation of 'broken people', psychiatrist says Opens in new window ] McLoughlin has a Gameboy for his long bus journeys to college. 'If I want to entertain myself, I have a specific game, a piece of media, that I'm going to engage in, and I'm controlling the environment,' he says. And he has a notepad, not a Notes app. 'I'll write things down physically on paper. I'll keep my notepad with me all the time.' Brocklebank has spent a lot of time reflecting on the hold his phone once had on him, and what it means to him to have freedom from it. Letting his phone run out of battery helps him appreciate the magnitude of the spell that was once cast on him. 'One day I was standing in the rain and my phone died and I was like, 'Oh, I'm holding a brick now,'' he relates. 'It took away a lot of the phone's power.' As for Nuala Whittle in Berlin? She has a sharper, more brutal tactic to reduce her smartphone use. 'Throw it,' she says, with a laugh. 'When you want to stop using your phone, launch it as far away from you as you can towards a surface that won't break it. If you're on the bed, throw it on to the couch. If you're on the couch, throw it on to the carpet. And then, if you're really comfortable in the chair, just rely on the fact that you're so comfortable that you don't want to get up.' 'Sometimes you have to do silly things,' Whittle concludes. 'Literally: just throw it away.' *Mary's name has been changed.

See inside 268-year-old Wicklow home on 40 acres priced at €990,000
See inside 268-year-old Wicklow home on 40 acres priced at €990,000

Irish Independent

time19-07-2025

  • Irish Independent

See inside 268-year-old Wicklow home on 40 acres priced at €990,000

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