The warning to rich Russians linked to Putin that the UK government “will come after you” and ensure oligarchs have “nowhere to hide” is likely to hit hard at the gated luxury housing estate in Surrey dubbed “Britain’s Beverly Hills”.
writes the Guardian's wealth correspondent.
Russians and those from former Soviet states own more than a quarter of the 430 luxurious homes in St George’s Hill, a heavily guarded 964-acre estate near Weybridge, Surrey, where mansions have changed hands for more than £20m each.
If St George's Hill sounds familiar, it may be because you have read The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill's thrilling study of radical ideas in the English civil war and Cromwell's Commonwealth.
Gerrard Winstantley, leader of the Diggers or True Levellers, is the most prominent figure in that book. In 1649 the Diggers occupied an area of common land near Weybridge, planted vegetables and invited everyone to join them.
That land was on St George's Hill.
Perhaps Winstanley has a message for its current occupants, for in his The New Law of Righteousness he asked:
Was the Earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?
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