In 1970, Sir Roger Daltrey bought Holmshurst Manor, a Sussex manor house. More than half a century later, The Who frontman still owns it

Oast House Archive, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Plenty of rock stars have bought grand country houses and sold them a few years later. Roger Daltrey did the first part. He never got around to the second.

In 1970, the singer of The Who bought Holmshurst Manor, a red-brick Jacobean house near the village of Burwash in East Sussex. It is still his home today, according to a 2026 interview with The Field.

Love at first view

Daltrey has described that first visit in some detail. In a 2018 interview with Sussex Life, he recalled the spring day in 1970 when he and his wife Heather first saw it. The first impression wasn’t promising. “The hallway was black as pitch, there was damp, the kitchen was terrible,” he said.

Then he saw the view. “We walked up to the front room and I saw the view. The house is on a hill looking across the valleys and villages of the High Weald of East Sussex. You can see for miles and miles and miles and miles. I stood open-mouthed and knew I had to live there.”

The move itself took a little longer. According to Daltrey, they moved in on June 26, 1971. He called it “the place that would be our home for the rest of our lives.”

In 1970, The Who were riding the success of Tommy, and Live at Leeds came out that May. Daltrey had grown up in rented rooms in Shepherd’s Bush and worked in a sheet metal factory before the band took off. A 17th-century manor in the Sussex countryside was a long way from that.

Seven summers of scrubbing

Holmshurst needed work, and Daltrey did much of it himself. “It took me ten years to decorate Holmshurst,” he told Sussex Life. “At some point the owners had decided to stain all the beams black and it took seven summers to get them back to their original honey colour. When I wasn’t scrubbing, I was digging.”

The digging was for a lake. With help from the son of the landlord at his local pub, he cleared out a muddy pond and raised its dam. Eventually there were four connected lakes. “I ended up with four interconnected lakes and could invite all my old workmates from the sheet metal factory to come fishing,” he said. They told him it was “criminal” to keep it to himself, so he opened Lakedown Trout Fishery to the public.

Under his care, the estate has grown from 35 acres to almost 600.

Still there

The Who went through enormous changes over the following decades: the deaths of Keith Moon and John Entwistle, reunions and farewell tours. Holmshurst was the constant.

In 2023, GB News reported that Daltrey had lived there for 50 years and still owns the estate, which now includes a sauna and a recording studio as well as the lakes.

It was also where he raised his family. Talking about those years, he told Sussex Life: “It didn’t matter how crazy things got on the road, I knew I was always coming back to stability.”

From Shepherd’s Bush to “Sir”

In June 2025, the boy from Shepherd’s Bush became Sir Roger. The Who’s official site announced that he had been knighted in the King’s Birthday Honours, recognized for his contribution to music and for his fundraising for the Teenage Cancer Trust. “It is a wonderful honour for me and especially for Teenage Cancer Trust,” he said.

He bought Holmshurst when he was in his mid-twenties. Now in his eighties, he’s still living on the hill he first saw in the spring of 1970.