Grand Avenue’s grandest home, built by the inventor of British Summer Time and Coldplay singer Chris Martin’s great great grandfather, is up for auction with a guide price of £2.5million.
The Grade II listed red-brick mansion, with distinctive chimneys, was also the first premises of Hove Library in 1891, before it moved in 1901 to Third Avenue, and then to its purpose built home in Church Road in 1908.
It has also been home to a doctors surgery and is currently divided into eight apartments, all of which are currently vacant. It’s understood the last person to live there was the owner, who has now passed away and left the property to four charities.
It will go up for auction on 30 March – although the listing warns that it needs complete renovation.
Although he was not the first person to come up with the concept of daylight saving time, which had previously been mooted in New Zealand, William Willett was the first person to devise and campaign for a scheme in Britain, publishing a leaflet in 1907.
His idea gained some traction in Parliament, but it was the First World War and the need to save coal which saw it finally pass into law in 1916 – the year after Willett died of influenza.
He is buried in Chislehurst but a memorial to his family stands in the churchyard at St Wulfran’s Church, Ovingdean.
Willett lived in Hove at Eaton Gardens and The Drive, both part of today’s Willett Estate conservation area.
