Key Details

Overview

27 Charles Street is a townhouse in Mayfair, London W1.

The Grade II listed freehold Georgian five-bedroom house provides nearly 3,800 sq ft of living space incorporating its original mews house.

Developed in the 1750s by aristocratic landowner Lord Berkeley, and designed by the master carpenter John Phillips, the six-storey townhouse has a main Charles Street façade of brown brick and stucco, with a slate roof, sash windows, and wrought-iron railings at street level.

During the 1960s, the four-reception room, seven-bathroom townhouse served as the first home and then offices for Brian Epstein, who was instrumental in the Beatles’ global rise to fame, serving as the band’s manager from 1961 until his death in 1967.

From 1963, the Charles Street townhouse was no longer his main residence and the townhouse was used as his business base where he developed an early incarnation of the now iconic Apple Corps, set up to protect the band’s business interests and reduce their tax burden.

To help Paul, John, George and Ringo evade their fans, Epstein let the band use Charles Street’s adjoining mews house as an under-the-radar “Beatles bolthole”
The Beatles mews house, linked to the main home via the basement also has its own discreet entrance on Hay’s Mews, providing the Fab Four with an escape route if fans assembled on Charles Street.

It is in the mews house that the Fab Four socialised and are believed to have worked on lyrics for the seminal 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and where they were famously photographed together in a bath tub that stood in the middle of the mews house’s sitting room for a publicity stunt.

In 1967 the house was bought by conservative politician and author Norman St John-Stevas, Lord St John of Fawsley.

Norman St John-Stevas was a member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet and one of her closest advisers, who served as Leader of the House of Commons between 1979 and 1981.

In 2023, the house is listed for sale through Wetherell for £8,750,000.