In the two years since Charlotte Church’s sound bath sent This Morning’s Alison Hammond into an eruption of giggles (you may have seen this clip do the rounds on social media), the Celebrity Traitors star’s wellness retreat has, well, gone into retreat. Church’s “place for healing through experiencing beauty and wonder”, The Dreaming, announced on its website earlier this week that it will be entering a period of “hibernation” from December.
Set in Laura Ashley’s (yes, she of the floral wallpapers) former property, Rhydoldog House, the retreat is slap-bang in the middle of Wales, equidistant between Aberystwyth and Hay-on-Wye, surrounded by forest and gardens. Its ethos, coined by Church, is that “by honouring and connecting with nature we can regain our wildness, and awaken spiritually”.
Its retreats have welcomed over 3,000 visitors in the past half decade and include courses like “Embracing the Light”, “Preparing for the Dark” and, simply, “Witch”. It may have a truly impressive 4.9-star Google rating, with reviewers noting the forest, waterfalls and silent disco as particular draws, but with some attendees paying as little as £1 through its pay-what-you-can scheme, it’s perhaps no wonder they’ve enjoyed it. One former attendee tells The i Paper: “It was a profoundly good experience.”
However, as the announcement suggests, with its reference to “exponentially complexifying crises”, The Dreaming has not been a financial success. According to most recent accounts, available on Companies House, the company has net liabilities of £811,526, up from £707,550 the year before.
Now, that’s nothing compared to the sort of money Church earned as a child star – tabloids reported she had a £25m fortune, but when she legally gained access to her trust fund at 18, her mother publicly stated it was closer to £7m, much of which Church told The Big Issue she “gave away”. What’s indisputable is that the 40-year-old singer’s finances have drastically fluctuated over her lifetime. The thing is… does the ecologically-minded self-professed “spiritual guide” actually care?
Church did not come from money. Born in 1986, her biological father left when she was two, and her mum Maria raised her alone in Llandaff, a suburb of Cardiff in Wales, and married James Church in 1992. Charlotte took on his surname and in 1999 he legally adopted her. It took a chance meeting between Maria and Jonathan Shalit, a Welsh music impresario, to turn Church into a tween star.
Maria and James managed Church into superstardom – her 1998 classical album Voice of an Angel, released when she was just 12, sold nearly three million copies, her eponymous follow-up in 1999 sold almost 1.5 million and her Christmas album released in 2000 sold over 1.6 million copies in the US alone. Church sang for Pope John Paul II, Queen Elizabeth II, Bill Clinton and even performed at The Sun proprietor Rupert Murdoch’s 1999 wedding to Wendi Deng.
Even though the money in the CD era was sweet, coming of age during the avaricious tabloid frenzy of the 90s and noughties was not easy.
No sooner had BBC presenter Chris Moyles said that he had wanted to “lead her through the forest of sexuality now she had reached 16”, than The News of the World began hacking her phone. Church would later tell the 2011 Leveson Inquiry into press intrusion that the press had installed secret cameras outside her home, followed her car and attempted to take upskirt shots of her when she was just 17 years old. Church also claimed that The Sun found out about her first pregnancy with then-partner, the Welsh rugby player Gavin Henson, before she even had a chance to tell her own parents. The News of the World later paid Church £600,000 in a settlement. It wasn’t the only legal action Church faced – in 2000, Shalit, who Maria had sacked, sued Church for 40 per cent of everything she’d earned. He eventually won up to £2m in a settlement.
All the while, Charlotte was trying to break out of the mould she’d been set. By the time she was 14, she was fed up with performing classical music. “I was not into the music I was singing in any way, shape or form,” she recently told the BBC. However, her desire to pivot to R&B wasn’t taken seriously, she added. “I was a commodity, I was making a lot of money for industry. When I wanted to write my own music and move away from classical crossover, I was basically told [by executives] in no uncertain terms, ‘There’s no way you’re gonna be able to.’”
But her 2005 debut pop album, Tissues and Issues sold 282,000 copies and produced at least two songs – “Crazy Chick” and “Call My Name” – that were upbeat and funk-tinged enough to have Girls Aloud’s Cheryl up in arms. A source close to Cheryl told The Sun: “She says Charlotte has no originality and reckons she is trying to copy the image that made them [Girls Aloud] a chart success”.
Cue much mud-slinging, including Church’s pithy insult: “Look love, when you can sing f**king ‘Ave Maria’, then you can have a go.”
Financially, Church was soaring over Cheryl anyway, pipping her to the post in The Sunday Times’s 2011 under-thirties rich list, with an estimated wealth of £11m. Church’s income came through both album sales and lucrative deals with brands such as Ford and Walkers, as well as three series of The Charlotte Church Show, which brought millions of viewers to Channel 4, not least for her and Amy Winehouse’s memorable cover of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. Church had also just upgraded from a £800,000 farmhouse (with a pub at the bottom of the garden, so she could drink away from the paparazzi), to The Spinney, a £1.3m manor in the Vale of Glamorgan. She’d also split from Henson, the father of her two children, but because they’d never married, there was no costly divorce bill.
Just three years later, though, Church told the BBC that she would always need to work, because she’d spent most of the money she’d earned. “I will have to work for the rest of my life. Not because I want to but because I have to.
“I always understood that all that stuff isn’t important and my career was not the be all and end all.”
The money, it seems, had gone on things like a Mini Cooper convertible, an £18,000 girls’ trip to Ibiza for her and her pals, a house for Henson so he could live closer to their children, a yacht moored in the Swansea Marina and, er, shoes. “I love shoes and I’ve got lots of ridiculous high ones that I take off after two hours, then I’m walking around barefoot,” she told The Sunday Times in 2010.
It wasn’t just that, though – declaring herself a proud “prosecco socialist” in 2015, it became increasingly apparent just how much of her money was simply going to charitable causes, including Action for Children, the Noah’s Ark Appeal, which raises funds for children’s hospitals in Wales, and Medical Aid for Palestinians. Church also helped found The Awen Project, a free learning community, and a friend who got to know her during this period tells The i Paper: “She’s very passionate about education and used to be masses of fun in the pub. I once turned up to meet her having genuinely lost my wallet but she was generous, just a total mensch.”
It was just after lockdown when Church, still nursing her first child with musician husband Jonathan Powell, decided to invest into her biggest project yet: The Dreaming. She “signed a piece of paper that tied my life savings to the bricks and mortar of Rhydoldog House”. As well as backing it financially, she led its “design, construction and creativity”, and even guided a course involving “nature crafting” and “deep imagination and soul journey to the ancestors”.
Making money was clearly not a driving factor behind the project. In 2024, Church told gossip magazine Closer “I am not a millionaire anymore”, explaining that she had long sold The Spinney to downsize to a semi-detached home, a 1600s cottage in the old town in Barry. She added: “I did say to my dad when I was 14, ‘I am not sure about this showbiz stuff. I am really not having a good time.’” But as her fortunes have changed – that Barry cottage is now on sale for £695,000 – so has her outlook on what a good life looks like.
Although sound baths and witch retreats might indicate Church’s departure from all things pop, like many 90s and noughties acts, she regularly performs at nostalgia-tinged events like Mighty Hoopla and regional Pride celebrations.
Without a party-centric back catalogue or record deal to her name, Church performs a melange of songs as part of her Pop Dungeon set. Where else would you get covers of Black Sabbath, Doja Cat, Bee Gees and Rosalia all in one go? “She is genuinely brilliant,” one booker tells The i Paper. “Money is never the issue with her, she just wants to make sure she has a good time.”
And that friend who used to go to the pub with Church has every expectation the singer will arise from the remnants of The Dreaming: “She wasn’t born with money and is a doer, she’ll just pick herself up and do something else.”