Latest news with #Dulwich
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Huw Edwards slashes price of his £4.75million family home AGAIN and his 'divorce has been delayed'
Disgraced ex- BBC presenter Huw Edwards has reportedly been forced to delay his divorce and cannot find a buyer for his £4.75million mansion. The six-bedroom detached property in Dulwich, south London, was put on the market last October after wife Vicky Flind filed for divorce from the former TV front man. The twisted newsreader and his wife first bought the sprawling home for £1.85million in 2006, 13 years after they tied the knot. But after he pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children last July, it was reported that Ms Flind, who is the mother of Edwards' five children, split from her husband and kicked him out of the home. It is understood the mortgage on the property has been fully paid off, meaning a sale will give him a bumper pay-day of around £2million now he is without his £475,000 salary. However, the sale appears to proving more difficult than first expected due to fears the home has been blighted by Edwards' reputation, according to The Sun. There is such little interest in the house that prospective buyers are being told by property website Zoopla that they would be 'one of the first' to view the 'hidden gem', nine months after it was first listed for sale. And they have even slashed the asking price by a whopping £750,000. The six-bedroom detached property in Dulwich, south London, was put on the market last October after Edwards' wife filed for divorce Estate agents in February were willing to accept £4.5million for the property, but dwindling interest has seen this cut to £4million. In an attempt to drum up interest in the south London home, they described it as being situated 'on one of Dulwich's most desirable residential roads'. They say the house, which is kitted out with three bathrooms and three reception rooms across its 4200 sq ft, is 'a substantial detached mid-century family house' with 'exceptionally spacious living accommodation'. An extract from the listing reads: 'The ground floor has a spacious reception hall, three reception rooms, recently re-fitted kitchen/dining room, office/library, cloakroom, utility room and downstairs WC. 'On the first floor there are four double bedrooms, one with en-suite bathroom and separate dressing room and a family bathroom. 'The second floor has two double bedrooms and a bathroom. Externally to the rear there is a most delightful, mature garden.' The Sun also reported that no decree absolute had been provided to end Edwards' 32-year marriage to Ms Find as of June 5. They say it is unclear whether problems with the sale were a factor in the divorce, which was expected to have been finalised earlier this year.
The Sun
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Shamed Huw Edwards' divorce delayed as he's forced to slash £750k from asking price for his family home
SHAMED BBC anchorman Huw Edwards' divorce has been delayed as the asking price for his family home was slashed by £750,000. His TV producer wife Vicky Flind filed for divorce days after he admitted possessing indecent images of children. Their six-bedroom detached mansion in Dulwich, south London was then put up for sale for £4.75 million last October following the couple's split. 3 3 But no buyers have come forward to take on the plush property amid fears it has been blighted by its links to the telly paedo. The property has attracted so little interest that online site Zoopla is still urging 'be one of the first to view' - nine months after it went on sale. Agents reduced its asking price by £250,000 in February - but a further £500,000 has now been hacked off as the couple attempt to accelerate their split. The couple bought the six-bedroom home for £1.85 million in 2006 and it is mortgage-free - and 63-year-old Edwards expected to rake in more than £2 million from his share of the sale. But the plummeting price means the presenter - who earned £475,000 at the peak of his career - has already lost more than £300,000 he hoped to rake in last year. He did not pay back £200,000 in wages funded by licence payers which he earned between his arrest over child sex charges and his resignation. Court records obtained by The Sun confirm that no decree absolute had been granted to end his 32-year marriage up to June 5. It was unclear whether property sale problems were affecting the divorce - which had been expected to have been finalised by February this year Edwards, 62, pleaded guilty in September to three charges of making indecent images of children and was given a six-month suspended jail term. The material included abuse videos of children as young as seven, which he received via WhatsApp between December 2020 and August 2021. Ms Flind initially stood by her husband but asked him to leave the family home after his arrest. He has since been living between a flat in Wandsworth, south-west London, and a property in Carmarthen, Wales. His Dulwich home is described by the estate agent as 'a substantial detached mid-century family house' with 'exceptionally spacious living accommodation'. It features three bathrooms, three reception rooms, a library, an office, a double-length garage, and mature gardens with decking. The agency said it sits 'on one of Dulwich's most desirable residential roads'. The couple, who married in 1993, have three sons and two daughters.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A psychedelic explosion in a dental surgery' – Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons review
Rachel Jones is frothing at the mouth, baring her teeth and licking her lips. The young English painter has an oral fixation, and the result is a show that looks like a psychedelic bomb has been detonated in a dentist's surgery. For six years now, Jones has been painting teeth and mouths in thick swirls of Technicolor semi-abstraction. Gums and lips appear over and over. Incisors are twisted, snapped, broken. There are smears of red, shards of jagged white, lumps of fleshy pink, all lost in trippy hazes of endless clashing colours. She has pushed her dental experimentation further than ever here at Dulwich Picture Gallery, where she is the first contemporary artist to take over the main galleries. She veers between ultra-abstract and damn-near-figurative, neon landscapes and pastel weirdness, and manages to balance it throughout. The first three canvases are vast 3.6-metre diptychs that loom over you as you enter. It is as if you are about to get chewed up and spat out by the art. A big grin of broken pearly whites peers out beneath a brick wall in one work, a sloping smile is turned sideways on another. Smudged whites and blues on the third look like a shaky, paused VHS tape of an old cartoon. The brick walls are a new motif for her, like something Wile E Coyote is about to be smashed into, implying violence and joy at the same time. Cartoon walls, chipped teeth, static, pixelation, it's like the abstract expressionists trying to draw Looney Tunes characters. These are impressive, imposing, clever paintings, though at points their size and pleasant abstract qualities do make them feel a bit like trophy art for the mega-rich. The smaller pieces on wonky canvases in the central space are more intimate, and better as a result. Lips and teeth are stretched and manipulated, obscured and blown up. Here, you get a bit more of a sense of the emotional and conceptual drive of the works. The exaggerated lips are riffs on oversexualised femininity, nods to racial caricatures. Blackened teeth look like disease or destitution, pristine gnashers are bared angrily or flashing joyfully. Eyes might be the window to the soul in all the old master paintings in Dulwich Picture Gallery's permanent collection, but mouths have just as much to say here. They are so heavy with symbolism, meaning and metaphor that you feel Jones could paint them for ever and not get bored. Tongues start lolling out on the bigger canvases in the final room, drooping and sagging moistly and strangely, and you feel as if you have been taken on a dental journey: bright smiles giving way to drunken loss of control. It's great, fun, hyper-colourful painting. Has it evolved much over the past few years? Has it developed since Jones first painted a mouth motif in that little canvas from 2019 in the second gallery? Not hugely, and that's a bit of a shame. I've seen and reviewed her work multiple times in the past few years and a bit more progression would keep things interesting. But I guess this is what happens when you find an obsession, and a way to explore it – you have to follow it through. Besides, Jones has done something hugely difficult: come up with a unique visual language in contemporary painting. Managing that after centuries of art, decades of abstraction, is impressive. Any contemporary art at Dulwich Picture Gallery is going to have to contend with being placed next to the likes of Rembrandt and Guercino. It's a tall order, but with this retrospective of cartoon-indebted gnashers, Jones pulls it off – by the skin of her teeth. Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from 10 June to 19 October
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons: Dulwich Picture Gallery has an identity crisis
It's hard to imagine a swifter ascent to art-stardom than that of the 34-year-old British painter Rachel Jones, whose exhilarating work is the subject of a new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Like many others, I've been tracking her career for a while, since one of her (mostly) abstract canvases – dense with lozenges and squiggles of colour so powerful that it seemed to bypass the retina and dance and stomp directly on the optic nerve – was included in a 2021 survey of contemporary painting at the Hayward Gallery, just a couple of years after she'd graduated from the Royal Academy Schools. A little later, now represented by international mega-gallery Thaddaeus Ropac (although they've since parted ways, and Jones, a fervent gardener who lives in a southeast London suburb, today operates independently), she had a solo exhibition at east London's Chisenhale Gallery that blew away Dulwich's head of programme and engagement, Jane Findlay; this exhibition, the first devoted to a single contemporary artist to fill the gallery's temporary exhibition spaces, is the result. Curated by Findlay across four rooms, it contains lots of new work, including eight vast pictures characteristically executed in oil pastels and oil sticks – all of which, in a taxonomic nightmare for tomorrow's art historians, have the same, intentionally oxymoronic title, 'Gated Canyons', and date from 2024. On this evidence, Jones's recent output is the same, but different. Like her slightly older peer, Allison Katz, she remains interested in the mouth as a motif: while, at first, Jones's pictures appear entirely abstract, on closer inspection, various shapes – like beads on a necklace, or an earthworm's segmented parts – typically coalesce into gigantic teeth and lips (supposedly inspired by the chops of cartoon characters), here occasionally accompanied by a lewd and dangling tongue. Lesser, more hackneyed artists consider the eyes as the window to the soul, but for Jones – who's interested in interiority, and uses colour to depict grotto-like landscapes of feeling – these free-floating, disembodied grins are portals to caverns of emotion, where colours bloom like coral or mineral encrustations or moss and lichen. At Dulwich, she also introduces a new figurative element into the mix: squidgy-looking, cartoonish bricks, which (like mouths) suggest the point at which inside and outside meet. Her smaller works – executed on bark-like slivers of paper and canvas with uneven edges – are bumpier in texture, muddier in hue, and less satisfying than their larger counterparts. In an odd move in these bigger paintings, Jones – with one exception – leaves bare swathes of the underlying brown linen, which imbues them with an unfinished air. Still, this sludgy negative space can't neutralise her almost caustic pinks and reds, and they radiate self-assurance and charisma – so much so that a dominant pair on display in the low-ceilinged third gallery feels horribly hemmed in. Quite what they are doing at Dulwich is less certain. Supposedly, Jones's work is in 'dialogue' with the gallery's permanent collection of Old Masters: specifically, and surprisingly, a tiny painting, from c. 1660-65, of the head of a reddish-eyed, white-coated hound, presented against a plain, olive-dark background, by the 17th-century Flemish painter Pieter Boel. While Boel's picture does, I suppose, depict a mouth, it has as much relationship to Jones's paintings as I do to the Dalai Lama. I understand that Dulwich – which, this autumn, will unveil a new pavilion where under-eights can play – is striving to broaden its audience. But it mustn't evolve into a split-personality institution that, in the pursuit of novelty, and contemporary art's crowd-pulling magic dust, becomes blasé about its core identity.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Telegraph
The sex parties coming to a stately home near you
The affluent south London borough of Dulwich is known for many things. It has a renowned art gallery, prestigious private schools and an idyllic park. Most people don't associate it with 'wax play', naked fire shows and parties stocked with 2,000 condoms. But that's exactly what guests got at Belair House, Dulwich, in April, when it was hired by the 'naughty events' company Heaven Circle. Not surprisingly, residents were less than impressed to learn that their local Georgian manor house, just a six-minute walk from Dulwich College, was being hired out for sex parties. The East Dulwich Forum, an online message board, was brimming with disgust and outrage and complaints were lodged with the local council. 'I've noticed these sex events happening in the last few months at a place that's supposed to be a restaurant and venue,' said one resident called Michelle. 'I was planning my wedding there and was appalled by the setup for those events. When I discovered what was going on, I was disgusted by how they were using the same rooms as 'playrooms' where families are supposed to eat. The hygiene and safety concerns are just unacceptable. They're destroying a sacred, Grade II listed building, and it's just not right. The owners need to be held accountable for their actions. It's time for us to stand up and protect our heritage and ensure that these spaces are used appropriately, especially when they should be serving families and the community.' But other locals were more sanguine. 'I've been to some kids' parties at Belair House and also for brunch in the restaurant. It is a lovely venue but it's looking shabby and needs some serious renovation,' wrote Nicola, a resident of 10 years' standing. 'I am surprised that it's being used for high-end swinging parties, and I do think it would be better used as a community space which everyone can enjoy. But I don't blame the owners for needing to fund the upkeep of a building like that.' Dating back to 1785, Belair House is described by its owners as a 'timeless function space that works perfectly for any occasion'. It has been used as a film set and for weddings and parties. To hire the venue for the evening on a weekend costs £7,000. Belair House didn't respond to our request for a comment. Sage Waterhouse has worked for Heaven Circle since September 2024, and says the party it held at Belair House was 'her favourite so far'. The invitation on the company's Instagram promised '500 candles, 500 roses, 1 stunning mansion from the 1700s, Two DJs, THE BIG BED, 3 playrooms, 5 performers, 1 shibari artist, 1 Domme, 2,000 condoms and 60 toys.' 'It was a wonderful venue,' she says. 'Normally our parties are held in more open-plan spaces, but this was like a townhouse, so it felt a lot more intimate and each room had a very different energy. We had naked fire shows, DJs and wax play. It was my first time modelling shibaru [the Japanese art of knot tying] and so that was very special for me.' Waterhouse says that finding venues to agree to let them host their parties is 'very difficult'. 'There are certain presumptions about the swinger lifestyle that are very misunderstood and negative, and so often when we approach a venue we'll just get a flat no,' she says. 'But the staff at Belair House were lovely and the owners of the property have nothing against us.' Heaven Circle brings all its own equipment to a venue and takes it away when a party is over. Waterhouse says that for this event – named 'Knights of St Francis' – it brought in eight single mattresses and erotic artwork. 'I understand there was a slight issue with the public and concerns about it being near schools or the venue being used for kids' parties,' she says, 'but I think it's such a shame that we face this kind of judgment.' Heaven Circle has been running since 2014, and prides itself on its exclusivity. Waterhouse explains that partygoers must apply to become a member. 'We have 12 members of staff who we call 'the masons', who verify and approve every [application] that gets sent in,' she says. 'Prices for tickets vary depending on the event and whether you're a guy, a girl or a couple, but they're typically around £80. The range of people we get is extraordinary.' Waterhouse says that the parties are funded by ticket sales and donations from wealthy individuals. 'Swinging and sex parties have definitely evolved in recent years and become more mainstream, appealing to a different kind of clientele as a result,' says Chris Haywood, a reader in critical masculinity studies at the University of Newcastle. 'The type of person who would go to a party in a mansion tends to be very different from the type who would be comfortable seeking out a traditional sex club. We're seeing more millennial and Gen Z couples, more middle-class women.' Haywood has been researching the UK swinging scene since 2018 and says that the average age for a swinger is 45, and 70 per cent of female swingers identify as straight but are 'bi-curious'. 'For many people, sex parties have shaken off their seedy image, and we're seeing black-tie balls in stately-home-type venues becoming more popular. Social media and the ability to hear about parties online has also opened up the scene in a new way.' Heaven Circle claims to have 114,000 members and Waterhouse says it will 'most likely' hold another party at Belair House. 'We've also thrown a party in a castle in Scotland and we're looking at venues in Surrey and Hertfordshire, too,' she says. 'My best party was a 'sorority party', just for women, where I arranged a nude ballerina and a human fruit table.' Meanwhile, Belair House is back to hosting more traditional events, including a Tesla test-drive event, a 40th birthday and lavish white weddings. Although, in light of the Heaven Circle bash, even the most wholesome occasions take on a new meaning. Anyone fancy tickets to the 'Sunday jazz and roast'?
