How Mark Preston is modernising the Grosvenor estate

Mark Preston is nowhere to be seen as I arrive at Apricity, a newish restaurant just around the corner from Bond Street station in central London.
The maître d’, showing me to the table, informs me that Preston is downstairs, and has been for the past 20 minutes, talking to Apricity’s owners. He regularly does this with his tenants, which Apricity is, given that it sits in the heart of the Grosvenor family’s estate that Preston has run for the past 16 years.
“Over recent years we’ve become much more engaged with our occupiers than we historically would have,” he says, explaining where he’d been. “This is a partnership; we’re trying to do something together. That’s a change from the old days when landlords would say ‘Here’s the space, here’s the lease and we don’t want anything more to do with you except to collect the rent.’ It’s changed hugely for the better.”
Grosvenor is an international organisation whose activities span urban property, food and agtech, rural estate management and support for philanthropic initiatives. It also owns a large chunk of Mayfair. It is not a job that Preston, 56, expected to have: for most of his childhood he thought he would follow his father into the military.
“He knew that if he’d said, ‘Well my boy, I expect you to go in,’ I would have dutifully done so, but I think he could see that I wasn’t necessarily convinced by it. I vividly remember him saying, ‘Mark, if I were your age now, I wouldn’t go into the army.’ I don’t expect he actually meant it, but it was his way of making it clear that there was no expectation from him.”
With his parents “yo-yoing between Germany and Northern Ireland”, Preston was sent to board at Eton College, where he was a few years below two future prime ministers, David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
“Boris was already a very big character. Everybody knew Boris. With David Cameron, he was just another pupil,” Preston says.
The waiter comes to the table to take our order but Preston has not seen the menu. Because Apricity is a “low-waste, sustainable restaurant”, the menus are to be found via a QR code on the table, which proves problematic because Preston has left his phone in the office.
After looking at the waiter’s iPad, he goes for the red butterhead lettuce for starters, followed by Cornish mackerel and a bowl of spring greens to share. I plump for tempura courgette and Devonshire hake and finish off the glass of chenin blanc from Preston’s photoshoot that he has not touched. “During the week, I hardly drink at all,” he explains.
After studying land management at the University of Reading he landed a plum job at Grosvenor as a graduate surveyor. He was tasked with looking after the estate’s garages, “the lowest-value properties we had”.
“I learnt my ropes around here 35 years ago, with people who’d been at Grosvenor for 35 years, and I thought, ‘That’s not very imaginative, have you not been anywhere else?’ Now I’m that person,” he says, chuckling.
The starters are brought out. I am concerned when I see that my courgette is actually courgette flowers, but it positively surprises me: I would have it again. Preston is more interested in the fact that his lettuce was grown in Elephant and Castle.
There remains a debate about whether, in this day and age, a family should own 300-plus acres of land in the middle of London because one of their forefathers was good friends with William the Conqueror and another married a 12-year-old girl with a large dowry.
Preston says the Duke of Westminster and the rest of the Grosvenor family know that they “are in a privileged position and that they owe something to society in response”. He makes the argument, however, that Mayfair and Belgravia is as pleasant as it is primarily because much of it is owned by one family.
“If this wasn’t owned by Grosvenor but by private equity, say, it would be totally different around here,” he says, looking out of the window down Duke Street. “For example, the work we’re doing on Grosvenor Square to turn it into a beautiful garden, you can’t justify doing that unless you’ve got a very long-term view because there’s no immediate rental or value benefit.”
He has worked his way up through Grosvenor over the past 35 years. For a while he was stationed out in Hong Kong, where he was responsible for overseeing the group’s move into Asia. Most importantly, it is where he met his wife, who was also working over there at the time.
A short while after he got back from a four-year stint as Grosvenor’s man in San Francisco, Preston was promoted to group chief executive. It was summer 2008 and the financial crisis was about to hit.
“The timing was perfectly awful; hell on wheels is about what it felt like,” he recalls. “But in a strange sort of way, it probably helped me establish myself as the CEO after these very big shoes I was filling.”
As the world’s financial and property markets started to collapse, Preston responded by selling off a number of buildings to try to free up some cash. Mostly he looked overseas for bits to sell, but he also got rid of some buildings in the prized London estate. In hindsight, he says he raised more cash than he needed but he would do exactly the same again.
“For Grosvenor, long-term survival is the name of the game,” he explains. “Unlike public companies, who can press the rights-issue button, we’ve only got one shareholder and he hasn’t got money sitting anywhere else; it’s all invested here. We can’t sail as close to the wind as others.”
The first few years of his leadership were about weathering that storm. Since then he has sought to diversify the business, both in terms of the buildings it owns and also investing the family’s fortunes away from property.
Mayfair remains the jewel in the estate’s crown, but Grosvenor now owns medical centres in Australia, warehouses in Poland and student housing in Brazil. Under Preston’s watch, and at the direction of the eco-conscious duke, Grosvenor has also poured hundreds of millions of pounds into various food and “agtech” businesses, including a vertical farming company, a maker of environmentally friendly fertilisers and a manufacturer of plant-based bubblewrap. Grosvenor even owns a stake in the meal kit retailer Gousto.
The food arrives. The hake is cooked perfectly — you’d expect nothing less for £40 — and Preston praises his “delicious” mackerel: “It’s very nice because, for the want of a better word, mackerel can sometimes be quite fishy.” Neither of us are as effusive about the spring greens. “It’s a bit leathery, isn’t it?” Preston whispers.
The conversation naturally turns to the budget on October 30. Instead of paying 40 per cent inheritance tax every time a duke dies, Grosvenor pays 6 per cent of the estate’s value every ten years. Preston and his team have been running all scenarios should Labour look to tweak that arrangement.
“I need just to say that October 30 is a date that’s blocked out in my diary,” he says. “We’re expecting that there will be something in [the budget] that is going to affect us, but quite what it is we don’t know.”
Any change could potentially be costly for the family, but Preston is long enough in the tooth to see the bigger picture. “Over the years, governments have come and gone, taxes have gone up and down. We will do what we need to do to play our part and to help society by paying our fair share.”
Age: 56
Education: Eton College; University of Reading (BSc land management); Insead (International executive programme).Career: Graduate, Grosvenor Property UK (1989-94); associate director, Grosvenor Property Asia (1995-97); fund management director, Grosvenor Group (1997-2002); president, Grosvenor Property Americas (2002-06); chief executive, Grosvenor Property UK (2006-08); chief executive, Grosvenor Group (2008-present).
Other: Trustee, Woodland Trust; chairman, Black Stork Charity; honorary vice-president, Cambridge University Land Society; trustee, Urban Land Institute.
Family: Married with three children
2x water cover charge £4Glass of chenin blanc £14.50London red butterhead lettuce £16.50Tempura courgette £18Devonshire hake £40Cornish mackerel £39Spring greens £82x School Food Matters donation £1Service charge £11.28Total £152.28