The wealthiest, flashiest people I’ve ever met were at Mill Hill, where I went for secondary school – and I’ve never encountered anything like it since. I spent my teenage years going every day to this huge campus, in a peaceful, leafy, village-like suburb of north London, with expansive, beautiful grounds and Greco-Roman architecture. In 2026, it costs £10,000 a term – or £18k if you’re a full-time boarder.
It hasn’t got the old-school poshness of somewhere like Eton, with hundreds of years of generational wealth, and it isn’t especially academically selective – it ranked 43rd of London’s private schools in the 2025 A-Level results, and that’s a major improvement from when I was there in the early noughties. From my year, there was just one pupil who went to Oxbridge. And while the fees obviously cost a huge amount of money by any standards, it is not the most expensive school in the UK, or even in London.
No prime minister went to Mill Hill (20 went to Eton), but alumni include Nobel prize-winning biologist Francis Crick, Denis Thatcher, actor Harry Melling (Dudley in the Harry Potter films) and Evgeny Lebedev, the British-Russian media mogul and life peer in the UK House of Lords. His dad is Russian oligarch, and former KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev.
