All the fun of the fair

Today, a watered-down version of the circus is in operation — “run by a cousin” — but the travelling outfit founded by Smart’s grandfather (the original Billy Smart) in 1946 featured a big top with room for 6,000 people, who were entertained by acrobats, elephants, polar bears, lions and a 15-piece orchestra. And Nazeing Park, on the Essex/Hertfordshire border — which Smart shares with his artist sister, Baccara, 33, and their mother, Hannelore, 66 — is just one of the fruits of that success.

The estate’s graceful late-18th-century house, fronted by five slender Ionic pillars, has 14,560 sq ft of living space, with 14 bedrooms and six spacious reception rooms. In its 70 acres of parkland, with views over the surrounding countryside, are 5,300 sq ft of stabling, a coach house, a water tower, a walled kitchen garden and sweeping terraced gardens.

Although it might seem a long way from the gaudy lights and sawdust of the circus ring, as soon as you step into the home’s elegant black- and white-tiled entrance hall, you find that period grandeur and the heyday of the circus are strangely fused.

“It’s the shirt on my back,” Smart says of the memorabilia found in nearly every room of the house, which he bought for about £3.5m shortly after the death of his father, Billy Smart Jr, in 2005.

The vast bronze hall table displays scores of black-and-white photos of his father, post-show, with all the A-listers of the day. There’s Joan Crawford, Richard Burton, Liz Taylor and Diana Dors.

There are nearly as many pictures of the flaxen-haired Smart and Baccara as children. They were used as “props” in the circus’s televised performances in the 1970s and 1980s, paired with trained chimps and thrown around by clowns. “It was good fun,” Smart says, “although they once used the wrong glue for my red nose and I was stuck with it for about a week.”

The circus was good fun — although they once used the wrong glue for my red nose and I was stuck with it for a week In one of the wood-panelled drawing rooms on the ground floor, leather cowboy-style saddles from the circus’s Wild West shows serve as objets d’art, and in the sombre deep-red drawing room, with its ornately plastered and gilded ceiling, a huge impasto painting of a trio of clowns dominates. Throughout the hallways of the three-storey home, acrylic and oil paintings of tigers, cowboys and showgirls hang alongside family portraits, many painted by Baccara in her studio over the stable block, a homage to her childhood (baccarasmart.com).

Smart shows off his most prized memorabilia on the first-floor landing, arranged in front of a striking set of trompe l’oeil imaginary hunting scenes at the estate — a collection of fragile painted wooden carousel horses.

“They date from the interwar period, before these horses were made in fibreglass,” he explains. “They come from my grandfather’s original travelling fairground, in Berkshire. So they’re very precious.”

And the hunting scenes? “Well, they aren’t to everyone’s taste, but they were installed by Nazeing’s last owner, an Irish builder, and I can’t bring myself to paint over them — they are a part of the house’s history.”

The next owner can decide whether to keep them or not. Despite the short time in which he has lived in what he describes as his “perfect Georgian gem, only 25 miles from London”, Smart has decided to put the estate up for sale. The price tag says “in excess of £6m”; he hopes it will fetch closer to £7.5m.

Why is he leaving? “I’d like to get back to my family roots in Berkshire,” says Smart, who as a young child lived in a 100-room home at the heart of Windsor Safari Park, which his father and uncles developed at the end of the 1960s. Although the park closed in the early 1990s (before reopening as Legoland), Smart still has a soft spot for the area.

Yet the sale is not prompted only by nostalgia. Smart, who describes himself as an inventor and sometime property developer — “Although I usually say I do as little as possible” — needs to free up some cash to advance an expensive patent he is working on for Smart Ship, a sophisticated docking device he hopes will revolutionise parking for superyachts the world over. “Old houses such as Nazeing take up an awful lot of time and need a lot of TLC, and I really want to focus on Smart Ship,” he says.

Selling the estate is not the only way he hopes to raise money. Over the past few years, he has been marketing other properties in his portfolio: there’s Chantry House, a double-fronted five-bedroom mansion on South Eaton Place, in Belgravia, central London, which he bought for £3.1m in 2003 and updated as one of the smartest corporate lets in the capital. Although he was hoping to get £12m for it in 2009, he reduced the price to £7.5m last year and it’s now under offer. Then there’s Old Cypress Bend, in Palm Beach, Florida, a new-build hacienda-style family holiday home, for sale for about £1.3m (oldcypressbend.com).

Also up for grabs are favourites from his classic-car collection, housed in one of the estate’s outbuildings. Models range from an immaculate cherry-red 1962 Willys Jeep Pickup truck, with a price tag of £14,500, to a Rolls-Royce Phantom V James Young for £130,000. “We all have a vice in life,” Smart says, “and mine’s old cars.”

He is adamant, however, that he’ll be hanging on to the magenta Corniche his father bought in 1972. “Rolls-Royce refused to do the model in that colour at first, but eventually they agreed.”

While he’ll be sad to part with some of the cars, Smart says he won’t be sorry to leave Nazeing — he plans to find another house with impressive architecture for himself and his family. (He wants to care for Hanne­lore, who has Alzheimer’s, at home.)

He does, however, regret not putting some of his grand schemes into action — he had hoped to market bottled mineral water from the 50ft well in the grounds, as well as use the land to host Highland Games, as it did in the 1970s. Plans have been drawn up to create a leisure centre, including an indoor swimming pool, and there is permission in place to upgrade the stabling complex.

Who does Smart expect to buy the estate? “It’s hard to say. I can definitely see lots of children running around — but really anyone who appreciates it and won’t run it into the ground.” One thing’s for sure, though: wherever Smart goes, he’ll be taking all that family history with him.

Nazeing Park is for sale with Savills; 020 8498 6601, savills.co.uk