Sunny Heights

Coordinates: 51°21′06″N 0°27′26″W / 51.351595°N 0.457161°W

Sunny Heights
General information
Town or city	Weybridge
Country	England

Sunny Heights, in St George's Hill estate in Weybridge, Surrey, England, was the mid-1960s home of Ringo Starr, drummer of the Beatles.^[1] Starr purchased his home on 24 July 1965 after bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison had bought houses. Sunny Heights, along with its large house and grounds, boasted its own bar, The Flying Cow, where Starr played host. The previous owner was Mr. H. E. Pope, who changed the name of the house from Haleakala to Sunny Heights II when he bought it in 1948; the name came from the house in Amberley that the Pope family had been evacuated to during the Second World War.

Manager Brian Epstein had hoped each Beatle would buy adjacent properties, with a central one for himself. While Starr and Lennon (who purchased Kenwood, a mock Tudor house nearby) did buy places close to each other on the same estate, and it comforted each to know the other could be found close by, Harrison broke herd by purchasing (Kinfauns) on a nearby estate in Esher; conversely, Paul McCartney bided his time and after living at Wimpole Street at the family of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher, he eventually bought a house at 7 Cavendish Avenue in St. John's Wood, a short walk from EMI's Abbey Road Studios and subsequently invested in High Park Farm on the Scottish peninsula of Kintyre as a retreat. (This would be immortalized in Wings' 1977 hit single Mull of Kintyre.)

Maureen Cox married Starr in 1965, joining him at Sunny Heights and giving birth to their three children (Zak, Jason and Lee Starkey). While this was their primary residence, Starr also kept a London apartment at 34 Montagu Square, Marylebone, which was often lent out to guests.

As the Beatles began to break up, Lennon sold Kenwood and bought Tittenhurst Park in Sunninghill, Berkshire in May 1969, while Harrison bought Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire in early 1970. Starr purchased Brookfield, in Elstead, in 1968 from actor Peter Sellers. When Lennon (with second wife Yoko Ono) moved to New York City in 1971, Starr bought Tittenhurst Park, moving in with his family, who lived there until 1988.

In 2013, Sunny Heights was purchased by a Russian billionaire, former USSR vice prime-minister and majority Avtotor car factory owner Vladimir Shcherbakov, who planned to demolish it and erect a new building on the plot in late 2015.^[2][3]

References

1. Bobby Whitlock; Marc Roberty (2011). A Rock 'n' Roll Autobiography. p. 114. ISBN 978-0-7864-5894-3. Retrieved 2015-07-08. Cite uses deprecated parameter |coauthor= (help)
2. "Oligarch to bulldoze Beatles’ £5.8m mansion". Daily Mail. 31 October 2015.
3. Бывший советский вице-премьер снесет бульдозером дом «Битлз» (in Russian). Komsomolskaya Pravda. 9 November 2015.