Caroline: Agatha Christie is, without a doubt, best known as the author of dozens of brilliantly crafted whodunnits and the creator of enduring characters like Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. She is unjustly slightly less famous for her many successful plays, but I still think that The Mousetrap, at least, with its record-breaking almost 72-year run, squarely puts her on the map as a playwright even for those who wouldn’t consider themselves dedicated followers of Christie. And her travel writing, her poetry, and her broadcasting is beloved by fans, if not by the general public. As a writer of romantic or psychological fiction, she is a little more obscure — the Mary Westmacott pseudonym she used for her six novels of that type does keep it somewhat separate from the rest of her reputation — but real aficionados still love and respect her work in that arena too.
But Agatha Christie was a very busy woman, and as well as all of this literary activity, she had another occupation that she enjoyed greatly: buying and decorating houses. During what Christie called her “plutocratic period” in the 1930s, before complications about tax owing on her earnings in both the US and the UK kicked in, she bought houses almost as often and as casually as a player in the board game Monopoly does. I believe at one point she owned eight at the same time, and even though her count dwindled into the 1940s and 1950s, acquiring and renovating and organising property was a major way in which she used and enjoyed the fortune that her books had provided, and how she expressed her personality somewhat shielded from the intense public scrutiny on her other occupations.
And so, today, we are going to take a look at Agatha Christie’s many houses, and see what we can learn about her from them.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
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Why houses, you might be wondering. What does an awareness of her house-buying habits add to our understanding of Agatha Christie? Well, in my time exploring and appreciating Christie’s work, I’ve come to realise just how complex a character she is. She’s someone about whom a lot of people know a little bit, and I think she deliberately cultivated certain aspects to her public persona — such as the not entirely accurate idea that she was “shy” — in order to keep public intrusion in her real life to a minimum.
One of her other tricks was, I think, to draw a veil over just how active and strategic she could be in pursuit of something she found interesting or worthwhile. As you’ll see, the skill with which she navigated the property markets of the 1930s is not at all what we would expect from the character of “Agatha Christie” she liked to project who was “just a little lady, writing her little mystery books”. View her biography through the lens of houses, rather than books, and a very different person begins to emerge. A powerful, decisive person, who matches the scope and vision of those books rather better.
The place we need to go, then, to begin our property biography, is Christie’s very first house — Ashfield, the sizeable villa on Barton Road overlooking Torquay where Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15th September 1890. In her autobiography, Christie famously described herself as having had “a very happy childhood” and her memories of this house are very tied up in this. At the very start of her autobiography she names having a home and garden that she loved first in the list of factors contributing to her early happiness. Her mother had committed herself Ashfield on sight, when she was only supposed to be looking for rooms in Torquay to rent for a while before the Millers returned permanently to America, where her father had been born and partly brought up. The house was a “blessing”, she felt, and the sense of peace Clara Miller experienced there clearly transmitted itself to her daughter too.
Ashfield was not intrinsically magical. It was a solid Victorian villa, with a conservatory attached and a garden that ran into a kitchen garden and then some woods. It had beautiful views over the sea, but it was an unfashionably long and steep walk down to the bustle of the promenade. But it was magical to Agatha, who made the garden enchanted in her imagination and was still thinking fondly of the rocking horse in the greenhouse when she was in her eighties. Her bond with Ashfield, I think, was strengthened by her age differences with her siblings — Madge was eleven years older, and Monty ten. By the time she was old enough to be aware, they were away a lot at school and then living their own lives, leaving the family home as the domain of little sister Agatha alone.
We can glimpse Christie’s abiding passion for Ashfield in two of her books in particular. Lucy Angkatell’s devotion to her family home, Ainswick, in The Hollow from 1946 feels comparable, and then the way The Laurels is written about in her last novel Postern of Fate is significant too. Even in the 1970s, she was still thinking about Ashfield’s veranda, or loggia, and the rocking horse and the garden, as she sent a pair of characters, Tommy and Tuppence, that she had created in the early 1920s to this house to retire in their old age. The book opens with Tuppence revisiting favourite books from childhood; it isn’t hard to see how Christie is engaging in a similar exercise in this book with her own memories.
And yet, Christie sold Ashfield, many decades before she wrote these passages. She parted with it in 1938, long after both of her parents were dead, in part because it was starting to feel like “a parody of itself”. It was no longer an isolated villa on a road that lead straight out into the fields; the growth of Torquay was starting to encroach on its grounds as new building climbed the hill. She had been born there, fallen in love there, grieved for her parents there, given birth to her daughter there.
Yet her second husband, Max Mallowan, had no attachment to it and urged her to be practical. She also wanted the money for a bigger, better house — Greenway, a Georgian mansion set above the River Dart that she described as “the ideal house, a dream house”. Still, when Ashfield was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the new housing that now stands on the site, she cried “helplessly”. Although she had long left Ashfield behind, the version of herself that been so happy there remained with her always.
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One of the peculiarities of Agatha’s marriage to Archie Christie was that, because of the First World War, they had been married almost four years before they actually lived together. They had met in October 1912 and married on Christmas Eve 1914, while Archie was on a brief leave from the fighting in France. Although they were able to spend other leaves together and write regularly, when he finally came home for good they had lived essentially separate lives for the six years that they had known each other. He had gone wherever the Royal Flying Corps, and then the Royal Artillery had deemed it necessary. Agatha had remained at Ashfield, working at the hospital in Torquay and writing her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. But in September 1918, and that meant Agatha could go house-hunting.
Their first home together was a flat at 5 Northwick Terrace in St John’s Wood, London. It had to be London because Archie had been allowed a few months before the official end of the First World War in order to work at the newly-established Air Ministry on Whitehall. His pay was low and Agatha had little money of her own, nor any prospect of early any at that time, her first book having been rejected by every publisher to which she had sent it. The flat cost two and a half guineas a week and was “microscopic”, with only two rooms. Still, they had plenty of domestic help, in the form of a Mrs Woods, who lived in the basement of the sub-divided house and “did” for them, as well as Archie’s batman, Bartlett.
The flat was less than ideal, and because the war had pressed pause on their lives, the newly married couple were not really young enough to laugh it off — Agatha was 28 and Archie 29. The beds were full of “hard iron lumps”, Agatha later remembered, but still, she enjoyed negotiating for groceries and making their rations go as far she could. She was lonely, missing her family and their extensive social circle in Devon. Her relative poverty kept her from some of their former connections in London; those kind of people did not pay visits to tiny flats in St John’s Wood. Agatha took a book-keeping course during the long days that Archie was away at work, preparing for a life as a working housewife that was never to materialise.
It was while she was at her course that the end of the First World War was announced. This brought change, as it did for most people at the time. A few months later, while on a visit to Ashfield, Agatha discovered she was pregnant, and she was then horribly sick for the whole nine months. Archie resigned his commission and found a job in the City which brought in more money. On 5 August 1919, at Ashfield, gave birth to her daughter Rosalind. Two weeks later, she was back in London looking at flats, keen to find somewhere with space for the nanny and the maid that would help her look after the new baby. The rental market was very competitive, with many young families in the same position as the Christie, but with some persistence Agatha found a new flat, No 25 Addison Mansions in Hammersmith, and took it furnished at a price of five guineas a week.
She hated the furniture and china that came with it, though, and longed to have a place she could make feel like home. Plus, the people they were subletting from would be back soon and wanting their flat back. The market was “hellishly difficult”, though, and for weeks there was nothing. Then the Christies got trapped in a rental chain — they thought they had secured a flat in Battersea Park, only for that to fall through as the place the owner was moving to ceased to be available. Feeling desperate, they agreed to buy a house in Scarsdale Villas, South Kensington, despite not really having the money to fund that kind of purchase.
Then by luck, one morning Agatha spotted an advertisement for an unfurnished flat in the building opposite where they currently lived in Hammersmith. By moving quickly — literally, she ran there as soon as she saw the ad — Agatha was able to secure No. 96 Addison Mansions unfurnished at the rent of 90 pounds a week. Four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and no need to sell everything they owned to raise the deposit. It was the ideal solution. They managed to get out of the house purchase only being liable for the agent’s fee because there were other eager buyers. And in what Agatha described as “a moment of high financial genius on my part”, they kept on the Battersea Park flat but sublet it at a profit to someone else, thus funding their own new rent in Addison Mansions. It was her first real deal. Agatha the landlord and the property whizz was coming into being.
After the break: the houses the books bought.
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Given how many different flats and houses she ended up owning there over the course of her life, you could be forgiven for thinking that Agatha Christie really loved London. But in 1923, returned from the round-the-world tour with the British Empire Mission, settled back into No. 96 Addison Mansions and three books into a promising writing career, she longed for nothing more than to live in the countryside. A favourable serial deal for her fourth novel, The Man in the Brown Suit and the coincidence of Archie getting a new job in the City shortly afterwards made this seemed obtainable financially. He had also become a great golf enthusiast, and was keen to live near a good course. After many months of searching, they found a flat in a subdivided Victorian house called Scotswood in Sunningdale, which was available to rent for not much more than Addison Mansions. It wasn’t the country cottage of Agatha’s dreams — it was essentially in London’s commuter belt, and it wasn’t a cottage either — but it did have a garden in which Agatha fondly imagined Rosalind might enjoy some of the activities that had been such a feature of her own childhood.
By 1925, the Christies were feeling secure enough financially to contemplate buying a house. They even thought about having a new one built, in a development next to a golf course, but the cost of that put them off. After months more of looking — looking at houses was already one of her favourite pastimes, Agatha wrote in her autobiography — they settled on a so-called “unlucky” house near the station for Archie’s commuting. It was going cheap as the previous owners’ marriage had broken down, and although it was arguably above their means, the Christies got a mortgage and moved in. Archie suggested renaming this house Styles, after the house in Agatha’s first novel, and with hindsight one can’t help feeling that this too was an unlucky omen. Remember what happened to the mistress of Styles?
And it was from this house named Styles that Agatha went missing in December 1926, shattering everything that had been her life up to this point. Her marriage to Archie was over, as was her desire to be the perfect commuting stockbroker’s wife. Naturally, after the trauma of that year, she didn’t immediately get back on with buying property, but we do have an honourable mention in 1927 for Abney Hall near Manchester, where Agatha’s sister Madge lived with her husband, and where Agatha was taken after being “found” in Harrogate. She always had great affection for Abney. She later wrote several of her novels while staying there, in including After the Funeral, and dedicated too books, The ABC Murders and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas to Abney’s owner, her brother in law James Watts. As part of her recovery during this time, Agatha also rented another London flat, this time in Kensington High Street, so she had a base while seeing her psychiatrist on Harley Street.
“Agatha bought and furnished houses when she was happy,” biographer Janet Morgan writes. And so it makes sense that it was 1928 before Agatha began on another property project, once she had returned from her first solo trip to the Middle East and she was beginning to recover from her divorce and the end of her previous life. The house that she bought in 1928 was 22 Cresswell Place, a mews house which still had the original stables on the ground floor with a rickety ladder leading up to the living quarters. It required extensive renovations to turn it into a house, and you can just see Christie throwing herself into this, the first house that was truly hers and hers alone. She oversaw a redesign and redecoration project that resulted in extra rooms and a “marvellous green bathroom painted with dolphins”. The house appears in Murder in the Mews, a 1937 novella in which a young woman is found shot on Guy Fawkes night in her mews home.
Other houses were bought and sold over the decades, but Cresswell Place stayed in her property portfolio until her death. I think it mattered to her as part of her fresh start, post-Archie. It was Cresswell Place that she leant to the archaeologist couple Leonard and Katharine Woolley in 1929, the gesture that led to her trip out to see them in Iraq the following year where she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, for the first time. And it was at Cresswell Place that she reunited with Max in England after that trip, when she hosted him for breakfast. She felt shy upon meeting him again in this different context, she said, but the relationship quickly prospered; not long afterwards he came down to Devon to stay at Ashfield and, while there, marched into her bedroom and proposed marriage.
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One way of categorising Agatha Christie’s many houses is by her relationship with Max Mallow. There are those like Ashfield and Styles that belong to her life before Max, and then those that came after they became partners. 47-8 Campden Street in Kensington, for instance, is very much a Max house, bought as it was in the early 1930s for the convenience of his commute to the British Museum. This house had a second life for Agatha in 1943, when she reclaimed it from her tenants and scrubbed it out to receive Rosalind and her newborn baby. It was sold in 1947.
47-8 Campden Street marked the start of what Agatha herself called her plutocratic period, when she was buying houses and installing tenants in them at a great rate. She bought three more after this one that she and Max actually lived in, focusing on affluent west London neighbourhoods like Mayfair and St James. But these were investments, projects, not pieces of her heart. Her next major purchase was 58 Sheffield Terrace, which is where we truly see Agatha settling into her newfound wealth and power — although she had enjoyed living at Cresswell Place and Campden Street, they were small houses, lacking the grand proportions of Ashfield. 58 Sheffield Terrace, which Agatha acquired in 1933 and renamed “Green Lodge” after her remodelling works, had the high ceilings and large rooms she had long craved. At last, thanks to books like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and her burgeoning literary reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, she had the money to provide herself with the type of property and the lifestyle she had been brought up with. No more microscopic flats in St John’s Wood for her.
Sheffield Terrace is also the first place that Agatha gave herself a dedicated workroom, with a grand piano — she bought herself a Steinway grand — a large firm table with a hard upright chair for typing and a comfortable sofa for relaxing in between writing sessions. Her room, and indeed the house, did not survive long, though. It was bombed in October 1940, the basement and front steps taking a direct hit and destabilising the whole house. The furniture, including the piano, was rescued and stored at one of Christie’s other properties, but her Steinway was the never the same afterwards, she said.
Alongside Sheffield Terrace, which in the mid 1930s Christie seemed to regard as the perfect London house for her and Max, she was also on the lookout for a country retreat for them. It needed to be close enough to London for a quick weekend away — Ashfield in Devon was too far — and ideally it would be near Oxford and the Thames, which Max loved very much. She found what she was looking in 1934 in the form of Winterbrook House, a Queen Anne house in Wallingford with a garden that stretched down to the river. It had three bedrooms, three sitting rooms and a beautiful walled garden that Agatha loved very much. Max knocked two rooms together to make himself a huge library overlooking the river. Later, they had a squash court added which Agatha didn’t use much for playing sport in, but which came in handy during the war for storing furniture from her other houses. She always said that Winterbrook was more “Max’s house” than hers, but she seems to have enjoyed life there very much regardless. This is another house that she kept until the end of her life, and indeed it is where she died.
The next house is the proverbial big one: Greenway. Since I have made a whole episode about this that includes a tour — it’s called At Home with Agatha Christie from March 2023 — I’m not going go into huge detail about this one, because it’s all in there. Suffice it to say, Greenway was Agatha’s house, if Winterbrook was Max’s. She bought it in 1938, selling Ashfield to finance the purchase, and it was her dream house. And it retained that dream-like quality for a long while, because she had possession of it for less than two years before it was requisitioned by the Admiralty, and much of that time was under the chaotic conditions of the start of WW2, with evacuees, home guard under foot, and bombings aimed at the shipping on the Dart and the naval installations at nearby Dartmouth. It did not really become the well-known refuge so identified with her until she reclaimed ownership after 1945 and was able to begin renovations and restorations.
The second world war put Agatha Christie in a peculiar position, property-wise. She owned a lot of houses, but almost none of them were actually available for her to live in. Greenway was requisitioned for military purposes, and Winterbrook House and 22 Cresswell Place were both let to tenants for the duration of the war. Sheffield Terrace was bombed and uninhabitable. The insurance on 47 Campden Place was prohibitively expensive. Where to go?
Agatha and Max rescued what furniture they could and stored it in the squash court at Winterbrook and then rented a furnished flat at the very fashionable Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, also known as the Isokon Building. Especially once Max was posted overseas, Agatha liked the simplicity of her existence in this managed block, in which there was a restaurant for food and staff to organise laundry for you. She surprised herself by liking the modern, Bauhaus design of the place — she had always favoured older houses in the past, nineteenth century or earlier, but perhaps because everything felt so dislocated anyway, it felt good to be enveloped by a completely different aesthetic. She liked the cherry tree outside her window, too, as a reminder that the countryside was still out there somewhere.
Agatha Christie was fiendishly productive during her time at the Isokon Building, completing classics like The Body in the Library, Five Little Pigs and Sleeping Murder while she lived there, among many others, as well as working shifts in the dispensary at University College Hospital. Once Max returned, they kept the flat on until 1947, when they bought a new London property: Flat 48 at Swan Court, Chelsea, just off the King’s Road. Borodene Mantions in 1966’s Third Girl was inspired by this place, and it remained Agatha and Max’s convenient London pied a terre for the next couple of decades.
The plutocratic period of the 1930s was over. Tax issues and differing middle age priorities changed the way Christie saw her houses after the second world war. She enjoyed her life living between Greenway, Winterbrook, Cresswell Place and Swan Court, but she was no longer buying properties like sweets. Times had changed and her life had too. The upheavals and the many houses of the 1920s and 1930s gave way to a more settled pattern of existence. But we can still read the story of her life between these different dwellings, from Ashfield to the microscopic first flat she had with Archie, to her dream house at Greenway. She was building herself, brick by brick, house by house, into the author and the woman who we know and love today.
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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. You can find a full list of the books consulted and mentioned at shedunnitshow.com/agathachristiesmanyhouses. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also want to have a look the map of Agatha Christie’s England I created in 2021; you can find that in both physical and audio form at shedunnitshow.com/agathamap.
And don’t forget that my new book, A Body Made of Glass, has just come out and is currently available to order everywhere books are sold or borrowed. And if you do read it, I would really appreciate a rating or review at your platform of choice — it’s hugely helpful both to me and to other readers who might be deciding if they want to give it a try.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
