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Want to live like a Victorian? Jacob Rees-Mogg’s childhood home has just hit the market

‘The Old Rectory’ has an indoor heated pool, a pastry kitchen and a whopping seven fireplaces

Written by
Henrietta Taylor
Contributing writer
Jacob Rees-Mogg's childhood home
Photograph: Fine & Country
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If you ever fancied living the high life of Rees Moggy Mogg, now’s your chance.
This Grade II-listed country house, which is the Tory MP’s childhood home, is now on sale for a whopping £2.75 million.

Known as The Old Rectory, the extravagant Georgian property, which is nestled in the English village of Hinton Blewett, near Bristol, has eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, an indoor heated swimming pool (with a mirrored ceiling), sweeping views of the Mendip Hills and even a ‘walled courtyard filled with sweet smelling shrubs perfect for summer entertaining’. It also has two kitchens: a fancy Smallbone kitchen and an extra pastry kitchen, just in case the main one’s busy. The property, which is listed with luxury estate agent Fine and Country, is basically cottagecore on crack.

The Rectory
Photograph: Fine & Country

As well as being home to the Rees-Mogg family – including the late William Rees-Mogg (a Lord and former editor of The Times), his wife Helena de Clair and Rees’s four siblings – it’s also played host to the Irish family band The Corrs, and Tom Alexander, the CEO of Orange and T-mobile.

The palatial house is also something of a fortress. When William was targeted by the IRA, the family fitted their home with solid steel doors which remain to this day.

The Rectory
Photograph: Fine & Country

In 1998, Papa Mogg, William, kindly provided a run-down of the property’s history in a letter. The summary can also be found on Fine & Country’s website.

He wrote: 'The living at Hinton Blewett belonged in the Middle Ages to the Abbey at Bristol which, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, was turned into the Cathedral. Although the garden walls of the Rectory have been rebuilt, they seem originally to have been medieval. You will find that we repeated a Gothic arch which had been built into a part of the wall which was falling down. In a previous owners’ time, a medieval gold coin was found in a flower bed. I think there is a medieval priests’ house built somewhere inside the building and contained in the present dining room.’

Anyway, good to know it’s available – just in case you do stumble across a few mill. 

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