ABSTRACT
The Wentworth Estate in Surrey, west of London, is a prime piece of London stockbroker belt (or perhaps we might call it oligarch belt, the social soup of London being rapidly thinned by the rising house prices of the past decade to the point where the places once occupied by the merchants are now probably only occupied by the mega-rich). Wentworth houses an international golf course, a range of tennis clubs and sports grounds, and a sweep of mansions. It sits beside the Bourne River, just as the river enters the expanse of Virginia Water on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Covering 2.5 kilometres and home to a little under 2,000 people in a mixture of mansions, village, and both private and public roads, it is one of London's ‘premier’ estates, with its five- and six-bedroomed detached mansions currently on the market at between £8 million and £11 million. At the point of her retirement in 1990 Margaret Thatcher moved into a five-bedroomed house on a more modest private estate next to a golf course in the prosperous village of Dulwich in south London. She reputedly never lived in the gated development, but Wentworth, its 1920s houses and their modern copies built on a grander scale, is a model of the dream of secluded escape that Thatcher's house aped. Harold Pinter's own London residence, in a very expensive area of Holland Park, indicated quite how immersed in a world of privilege Pinter remained even after the Regents Park era, which gave rise to Old Times and No Man's Land, and the apparent contradictions of such contexts provided some of the ammunition for the kind of satirical jibes at left-wing luvvies or Hampstead socialists that were aimed at Pinter and his 20 June associates. Yet it also meant that the world of exclusivity behind gated driveways was a world that might be mined for its details and habits, for how it might be to see and hear the elite act and speak for themselves.
