Seventh Duke of Westminster Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor has again topped the Sunday Times’ Rich List for the under 30s.
The duke, 29, and family, whose ancestral home is Eaton Hall near Chester, are said to be worth £10.295bn – up £195m from the previous year.
He is ranked number one in The Young Rich List and 10th in the overall list.
Hugh became Britain’s youngest billionaire after inheriting the title and the Grosvenor empire on the death of his father, the sixth Duke of Westminster, in August 2016.
Grosvenor Group has a massive property portfolio which includes 300 acres in London’s Mayfair and Belgravia, North America and Asia. Locally, the company owns the Liverpool One shopping mall. This year the company gained permission to build 1,548 homes on the site of an old Bermondsey biscuit factory.
According to the 2020 Rich List, the duke is known by friends as ‘Hughie’.
He was educated at Eccleston Primary before attending Ellesmere College. Sharing his father’s love of football, he had trials for Crewe Alexandra at the age of 11.
After studying at Newcastle University he went on to work in estate management at Grosvenor’s Wheatsheaf Investment Company – which includes Aldford -based bull stud Cogent – and later Grosvenor Group.
In December 2015 he joined London-based green energy firm Bio-bean that makes biofuel from recycled ground coffee.
In his spare time, the duke enjoys country pursuits and is a keen cricketer.
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The Grosvenor family are close to the royal family. Hugh is godfather to Prince George as his mother, the Duchess of Westminster , is godmother to Prince William.
Since March, the duke of Westminster has made £12.5m available through his Westminster Foundation to charities or community groups providing much-needed support to those in need during the coronavirus crisis.
For example, it is match funding the Cheshire West and Chester Council ’s community response fund with £250,000. And it is funding the Blacon Action Team and their invaluable work to feed vulnerable families in the Blacon area of Chester.
Also in the Rich List is former Chester resident Simon Nixon, 52, founder of Ewloe-based Moneysupermarket.com, who is joint 105th in the list with an estimated £1.35bn fortune, down £15m on the previous year. Mr Nixon, who made £700 after selling his shares in the business, relocated to Jersey in 2013.
These days he backs online ventures such as Let’s Do This which sorts race entries for runners, cyclists and triathletes and vegan outfit Allplants. Nixon also owns £310m of property including his SimonEscapes holiday rentals from Lake Windermere and Cornwall’s Booby’s Bay to the Platinum Coast of Barbados and £500m of investments.
Property developer Steve Morgan, 67, founder of Redrow, whose businesses are registered to Carden Hall, Cheshire, is 187th richest person with wealth valued at £751m – down a huge £199m on last year. He stepped down from the board in 2019 but still retains a £245.6m holding. The Rich List reports that in 2017 he gave more than 42 million company shares worth £215m to his charitable foundation, which is handing £1m a week to charities hit by COVID-19.
Sir Malcolm Walker, 74, who co-founded Deeside-based frozen food group Iceland, is ranked 491th in the list. He and his family have an estimated worth of £265m. Walker started Iceland with a single shop and £30 working capital in Oswestry, Shropshire, back in 1970. The Rich List says he plans to celebrate his half centenary at Broxton Old Hall, his Elizabethan manor at a bash that will raise funds for Alzheimer’s, which Ranny, his wife of 50 years, has been diagnosed.
