For sale: the London home of Britain’s only assassinated Prime Minister

With its elaborate castellated pediment, arched and oriel bay widows, three round towers and snowy-white stucco façade, Hunter’s Lodge, in affluent Belsize Park, is anything but your average North West London home. Throw into the mix 500 years of history, the untimely demise of a British prime minister, scandalous royal shindigs and a recent, lavish three-year-restoration project providing a basement spa, glass-walled champagne cellar and cigar room, and this Georgian gothic revival castle makes for all-round drama.

Forming part of what is now known as Belsize Village, off leafy Belsize Lane, in NW3, the present, fantastical incarnation of Hunter’s Lodge was built in 1812, on the site of an earlier property once belonging to the grand 15^th-century Belsize House estate, a gift from Henry VIII to the Dean of Westminster in the 1540s. Owned by Westminster Abbey until 1808 (and demolished in the 1850s), the manor house was to have a roll call of illustrious names associated with it, with the original lodge used to house guests visiting the estate.