Garden Lodge at Logan Place in London’s chic Kensington is hidden by a high brick wall. In 1980 with Queen riding the crest of their phenomenal success, their lead singer Freddie Mercury bought the house for £500K, and It provided him with sanctuary and privacy as he tried desperately to hide his sexuality.
In 1969 Mercury had a long-term relationship with Mary Austin whom he met at Biba (THE fashion store of the time) where she worked as a manager she was 19 and he was 24 years old, a year before Queen had formed. The irony was that was the same year homosexuality was legalized in the UK.
They lived together for several years but by the mid-1970s, he had begun an affair with David Minns, an American record executive. Then in December 1976, Mercury told Austin of his sexuality, which ended their romantic relationship and Mercury moved out of the flat they shared but bought Austin a place of her own near his new address.
Even though Mercury had several male lovers …. even a few long term ones right up to his death from AIDS in 1991, he and Mary remained friends through the years Mercury often referred to her as his only true friend. In a 1985 interview, he said of Austin: “All my lovers asked me why they couldn’t replace Mary, but it’s simply impossible. The only friend I’ve got is Mary, and I don’t want anybody else. To me, she was my common-law wife. To me, it was a marriage. We believe in each other, that’s enough for me.”
So when he died he left Mary his Garden Lodge home having told her, “You would have been my wife, and it would have been yours anyway.”
After he died Mary chose not to marry painter Piers Cameron, the father of her two children, Jamie and Richard, and later divorced her husband Nick Holford. She later explained: “I lost my family, really, when Freddie died. He was everything to me, apart from my sons. He was like no one I had met before.”
Now 72, she lives a private life behind the high walls of Freddie’s London mansion but earlier this year shocked the world when she made an unprecedented announcement that she would allow 1,500 of Freddie’s personal treasures to be sold off at auction. And that is why Freddie Mercury: A World of His Own is showing at Sotheby’s in London until 5th September.
It is an exhibition unlike anything you’ll have seen before – a vast collection of Freddie Mercury’s personal possessions, from beaten-up board games and a collection of cats to dazzling costumes from his iconic stage appearances. And it’s entirely free to visit.
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The exhibition will close on what would have been his 77th birthday, 5 September, followed by six dedicated auctions. https://www.sothebys.com/
P.S..You can put bids on items now : today the hottest item is Freddie’s Tiffany moustache comb with an estimated value of £400/600 and which (the latest) bid is £24000!
