Amanda Sheppard has spent the last few years helping rebuild The Roof Gardens, a private members’ club six floors above Kensington High Street. Her name is more likely to ring a bell for something else: her 2012 marriage to Bryan Ferry, the Roxy Music frontman, which lasted two years.
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At a glance
| Full name | Amanda Sheppard (also known socially as Amanda Westbrook) |
| Age | 44 |
| First marriage | Bryan Ferry, 2012 to 2014 |
| Second marriage | Duncan Westbrook, since 2017 |
| Current role | Co-founder, The Roof Gardens, Kensington |
Meeting Bryan Ferry
Sheppard was working in public relations in London when she met Ferry in 2009, not long after her relationship with his son, Isaac, had ended. They married on January 4, 2012, at the Amanyara resort in Turks and Caicos, in what a spokesperson for Ferry called a simple, private ceremony. She wore a white Lanvin gown. He wore a suit from Anderson & Sheppard on Savile Row, a coincidence of surname that had nothing to do with the marriage.
He was 66. She was 29, a 37-year gap Ferry addressed directly when asked about it before the wedding, in an answer that got quoted for years afterward: “You never meet people your own age who aren’t married. Unless they are divorcees knocking about, that sort of thing.”
Why the marriage ended
The divorce went through in March 2014, after a London court hearing that Hello magazine reported as lasting about a minute. The paperwork cited “unreasonable behaviour,” standard legal wording under English divorce law at the time rather than a description of what actually happened.
Ferry gave a fuller account later, talking about children. “She wanted a baby and I didn’t,” he said. “I thought I could and then later I thought, it’s not the right thing to do. It was a terrible, stressful time for both of us.”
A career that predates Ferry
Early coverage of the wedding claimed Sheppard had given up her PR work once she and Ferry got together. Companies House records complicate that. Through the years she dated and then married him, she was also running three small London companies: AIA Productions Ltd, Rose Productions (UK) Ltd, and Cross&Fez Ltd. She co-founded the first of those, AIA Productions, in 2010 with India Langton and Alexander Spencer-Churchill, and took on the last of the three directorships in April 2012, three months into the marriage. Rose Productions, registered under a category covering support activities to the performing arts, kept filing accounts until 2021.
A LinkedIn listing under her name moves directly from “Director, Rose Productions” to her current title, co-founder of The Roof Gardens.
Marrying Duncan Westbrook
Sheppard remarried in July 2017, in Oxfordshire, to Duncan Westbrook, a fund manager who had been best man at the 2006 wedding of Camilla Parker Bowles’s daughter, Laura, and is friends with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. The Daily Mail covered it under the headline “Ferry’s ex weds man her own age,” and quoted Sheppard at the wedding: “So happy to be Mrs Westbrook.”
A few years into that marriage, she was photographed visibly pregnant during a visit to Daylesford Farm in the Cotswolds. What came of it hasn’t been reported anywhere since.
Running The Roof Gardens
Kensington Roof Gardens closed to the public in January 2018, after Richard Branson’s Virgin Group failed to agree new lease terms with the freeholder. The Grade II-listed site sits on the roof of the old Derry and Toms department store, which later became Biba, and its three themed gardens, Spanish, Tudor and English woodland, were laid out in 1938 by the landscape architect Ralph Hancock. The site sat empty for years until a consortium linked to Stephen Fitzpatrick, who also founded OVO Energy and Vertical Aerospace, took over the lease in 2021.
Sheppard’s LinkedIn profile puts her on the project from June 2020, before that deal closed, through planning approval and the club’s reopening in 2024. She is currently listed as co-founder and creative director. Founder memberships cost 1,000 pounds a year, with a reduced rate for members under 32, before the price rises to 2,000 pounds once that founding list closes.
