'Monster' houses, high-end restaurants and a rehab centre – it's all just daily life for footballers in one of England's poshest postcodes
What you might not notice are the security guards parked up as “static controls” close to the more opulent, Hollywood-style roads where houses measure upwards of 10,000 square feet .
“There was a lot of scaremongering at the time,” says Roberts. “But it’s a new generation of footballers now. Attitudes have changed and Hale, which always had the restaurants and huge houses, became on-trend again, probably more than ever.”For wealthy footballers, the answer was security — and lots of it. Almost every house has electronic entry and sophisticated anti-theft systems. Many have ‘panic rooms’ where homeowners can lock themselves inside if there is an intruder.
Broadway, in Hale, was next. Nobody will find it on Google Street View, though, because the cameras were barred from this stretch of Millionaires’ Row. Horse riding is also prohibited, presumably because anyone in a saddle could peer over the strategically high walls and hedgerows.