📍Nethercote, Winsford, Exmoor, Somerset, UK
1970 – 1977“Boris Johnson was born in New York in 1964, and his childhood was famously restless: the family moved between London, Brussels, Washington and Oxford as his father Stanley's career took him around the world. The one fixed point was Nethercote, the family's hill farm in a deep valley near the village of Winsford on Exmoor, which his grandparents had bought in the early 1950s. Boris, his sister Rachel and their younger brothers spent long stretches of their childhood there. Nethercote was remote and windswept, reached down a long track beside the River Exe, with sheep on the hillsides, moorland above and very few neighbours. Television was rare, and the children made their own entertainment: walking, swimming in the river, reading, painting with their artist mother, Charlotte, and fiercely competitive family games. Relatives have described a household that prized wit, books and winning, and where the children were expected to hold their own in argument at the table. His sister later recalled that young Boris announced he wanted to be world king. The farm stayed a family anchor long after childhood; Stanley continued to farm and write there, and the family gathered there in later years. Boris went on to Eton and Oxford, became a journalist, Mayor of London and, in 2019, Prime Minister. His love of the classics, rhetoric and the English countryside, and his habit of performing for an audience, are often traced back to those crowded, competitive summers on Exmoor.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google