Life on the porch of an empty mansion

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, the abandoned£210 million mansion and the rough sleeper who's made it his home.

0:25It has 45 rooms, four lifts, a swimming pool. One of my favourite things about it is it has 116 windows, 68 of which overlook Hyde Park, and they're also said to be bulletproof, although I didn't get the chance to check that. 24 Italian marble bathrooms... Guardian writer Sam Wollaston has spent time outside one of the most expensive houses in the country, a vast terrace mansion in Knightsbridge. Very nice. Buckingham Palace is not too far away. Kensington Palace is probably a bit closer. Albert Hall, just down the road. Don't ask me if there's a garden or not. There isn't a garden. There isn't a garden?

1:03You'd think for£210 million there would be a garden. but surprisingly this magnificent place has stood empty for more than a decade the ornate interior may lie vacant but outside someone's made it his home a Swedish man called Anders who's arranged so many flowers scraps and bicycles you can no longer see the property's entrance. So I just went along and said, hello, Anders, because I knew his name. And this grey bearded head appeared, remarkably cheerful for having just been woken up. But his story, probably more interesting than the house itself. I have lived here for three years. And every day, I think surely tomorrow I'll be rescued.

1:52But rescue never comes. So now we're talking to him, it makes me realise that, you know, how strange it all is.

2:04So who is the rough sleeper sleeping on the porch of this£210 million house? And why is this huge mansion empty? And what does it tell us about the housing crisis we live in? From The Guardian, I'm Lucy Hoff. Today in Focus, life on the porch of an empty mansion.

2:26Sam Wollaston, you're a Guardian feature writer who spent the last few months delving into some magnificent abandoned buildings across the country, one of them being a house in London right next to Hyde Park, which also happens to be one of the most expensive properties in the country. And the mansion, as we understand, is locked and its fate remains unclear. But there is, as you've discovered, one man settled on its porch, a man who I think we can safely say is the antithesis of all the wealth he sleeps in front of. Tell me about him? So his name's Anders, Anders Fernstadt. He's Swedish and he has lived here in the porch of this London mansion for the last three years.

3:09But his story goes back a long way before that. He's now in his late 50s. He was brought up in Sweden by his mum, who's a librarian, and his dad is Spanish, actually. He became a journalist. He had no training as a journalist, but he wrote about tech for business mags in Sweden and went to like tech conferences and things like that. And this is in the 1980s. So this was in the 1980s. So whatever the tech was in those days. But then he got interested in gardening and not just interested, but he decided to learn all about it. So he took himself to Edinburgh. I'm jumping the narrative, but it doesn't matter.

3:47But I came in 2009, make a long story short, I came to this country as a mature student at Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. Really? Studying horticulture or something? Seriously? Horticulture and plantsmanship. Plantsmanship is such a sweet little word. Are you into gardens and stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's why I'm, you know. And then did he stay in Edinburgh in the UK after that point? So he didn't finish his course. And there's a bit of a pattern there. He quite often starts things and doesn't finish. But he didn't finish his course and he went to America. and in California he met John Markoff who was a New York Times tech writer and he started doing some work for him.

4:30While he was there he met the Economist correspondent in California who told him that there were some jobs going in London and he came to London and ended up getting a job as a fact checker at The Economist. Does that stay steady for him? It wasn't a permanent job and he He was working remotely and he was living on a small sailboat in an Essex estuary in a place called Maldon. Around about the same time, his boat was damaged in a storm and things sort of started going wrong for him. He went freelance, but he describes himself as a freelancer with no commission and no desk. He ended up living in a tent in North London, which was the kind of beginning of his homelessness.

5:14So tell me more about what happened next in his homelessness. Was he applying for legal places to live, for social housing? He wasn't. He wasn't doing anything about it himself. But someone, he was actually living on a cricket ground. And someone else got in touch with Streetlink, which is the organisation that kind of puts people who are sleeping rough in touch with people who can help him. And this is, of course, the beginning of my sorrows when I get housing. because getting housing is just stepping into the Colosseum. What? World of unreportable crime. It was a sequence of hell, you know, hell has many layers as Dante would have, right?

5:58So I started in the upper crust of hell. Well, not too bad, but just a little... And then, so three no-fault evictions, and at every eviction it was like clockwork. When the bag was packed, it was gone. What, you mean as soon as you went in, you were evicted? Oh, someone nicked him? Yeah.

6:20The last straw was actually when he got hit by someone in one of these places and he'd just been evicted. He came in and gave me a sucker punch while I was laying down, ruptured my eardrum, threw a second punch, completely unprovoked. So I had to basically, in a state, not Adamic undress, but almost, make a jog over to a neighbour where they called an ambulance and then all your things are gone. Never to be seen or heard of again. So you had nothing? Yeah. He'd been going to Hyde Park quite a lot because he was interested in the birds there, particularly the swans, and he liked the area. either as my one of my teachers in Edinburgh said you're either a plant lover or an animal lover you can't be both and you were a plant lover yeah yeah but that's one see from if we were horticulturists they don't do garden damage do they not no they don't i mean they eat seaweed yeah all right so okay even a chicken can be trouble in a garden because they will pick the wrong stuff and so on So I felt justified.

7:28Yeah, yeah, I can be a swan man and an horticulturist, no problem. And wandering around there, then he saw that there was this building with a porch that provided shelter. And that's when he first started sleeping on the porch of Rutland Gate. I'm interested to hear about his decision to settle on the porch rather than try and attempt to enter or squat inside the house. Well, I don't think you would get into it very easily. It's very, I mean, actually, I didn't even try the door, but I think if I had done, I don't know what would have happened. And actually, it's quite hard to get to the door because he's got so much stuff on the porch.

8:06You could be in there. It's empty. Yeah, but... How do you feel about that? What I said to myself is like, it's like my pretend reality is I'm the child, parents are in the house. I just said, can I camp on the balcony? But at some point, it'd be nice if they let you into the house, wouldn't they? Because it's an empty house, you know. I agree. But now the fact that there's no downside. Yeah. So now it's like, you know, where do you want to sleep? In your room, son, or in the treehouse? Treehouse, treehouse, treehouse, treehouse. A little bit like that. It is a bit like that. He'd been in a few other places.

8:45He'd slept around a bit in London. and he thought this was, as he says, he likes the area. Don't we all? Yeah, and he likes, actually, he's actually made some friends amongst the neighbours. He likes the neighbours. He likes the park very much. And the porch is quite big, so it provided a roof for him. And over time, he's built himself. He doesn't have a tent. He has a big umbrella and a couple of smaller ones. And he's put up kind of barriers and he's got a mattress and he's got, I mean, he's made a kind of den there. It's quite a sight. It spreads out from the porch along the railings with all these flowers and other things that he's accumulated there.

9:24Sam, you spoke with him for hours and I've had the pleasure of listening to the recording. I think our listeners will get the same impression that I've got from that recording. And it does sound kind of somewhat happier than a lot of the people perhaps you or I know. How do you think he's managed to be so content in these? He's remarkably content for the situation. I sleep so well because that's really the test yeah I'm at ease I'm at peace I've never had a GP no I've been sick having come from being housed I'm not going to jump at any offer for anything knowing what you know how bad it can be you know it's much better here than it was in the oh you mean yeah infinitely better so do you have a mattress what have you got well it's I'm like the princess on the P it's like layer upon layer of goodness okay and the practicalities he has a very kind of optimistic positive outlook on on things which i mean is extraordinary he does say that he's very atypical of people who are sleeping rough and he says that you know he doesn't he likes to drink but he's not certainly not dependent on alcohol he's not doesn't have any um drug habits he says his health is good his mental health is good they're obviously things that are not great for him like he doesn't have a toilet he has to used ones in the park.

10:41He has to go and get food from food banks and things like that. And it's not a good life at all. But given the way he's living, he is incredibly negative about it. So for you as a writer, what drew you to this particular house, to this particular man? You've spoken a bit about the history, what the house looks like, but what was compelling to you about this story? So I was doing a series of pieces about empty buildings. The idea that there was somebody homeless living in the house that had been Britain's most expensive house, it just seemed to be such a visceral picture of the kind of wealth gap and the housing crisis.

11:24It just seemed to sort of say so much. What did you learn as you started digging through who the owners of the property had been? The property itself is, it's a strange one. It looks like a row of terraced houses. And actually, it was a row of terraced houses until the 1980s. In the 1980s, it was bought by Rafiq Hariri, who went on to become the Lebanese prime minister, and he was assassinated in 2005 in a car bomb in Beirut. Hariri had made his civilians building palaces for a Saudi royal family. So probably because of that, the property passed into the hands of Sultan bin Abdulaziz, who was the crown prince of Saudi Arabia at the time.

12:06And he lived there for a while after 2005. He died in 2011. And it was actually then that the rest of us got a sort of glimpse inside it. Not that we went in, but there was an auction of some of the stuff inside it. And that's when we saw all these gold-plated bins and stuff being sold. So we had a kind of idea of the opulence. that had been beyond that big door. Right. And so it's un-vacated, as you've outlined, but is it on the market? What do we know about who owns it? So we know it changed hands in 2020 for£210 million, which at the time was a record. It was the most expensive house in Britain.

12:44And it was bought by the person who at the time was China's richest man. His name was Hui Ka Yan, and he was founder of a property empire called Evergrande, appropriately, perhaps. It was then actually for sale about two years later for a knockdown 200 million. So you could pick it up. A bargain. Yeah, exactly. It didn't sell and Evergrande went bankrupt. A Hong Kong court has ordered the liquidation of China Evergrande. For a company that was once the pride of the Chinese real estate sector, it's been a dramatic downfall. The world's most indebted property developer, Evergrande, has been given a winding up order by a court in Hong Kong.

13:29It's quite hard to find out actually who owns these properties. But if you look on the land register, it says it's owned by a company called Vision Perfect Global Limited, which is based in the Virgin Islands. Well, it's unsurprising to learn that there is an offshore haven in this story. Do we know who stands behind what we can assume is some sort of shell company? It's a shell company. And we found out that it was bought by Hui Ka Yan, who was China's richest man at the time. And he was the founder of the Evergrande Property Empire. And actually, I just looked on the company's house website and the name has been changed from Hui to his wife.

14:09And her name is Ding Yu Mei. They've since got divorced. So we now know it's in Ding Hume's name and she is a Canadian citizen. So it's a palace in limbo. So Sam, we've been looking at one property which tells a particular story about these unoccupied buildings in the UK. We know that the UK has many of such properties that are vacated, lying empty. What do we know about the scale of the issue? So last year there were 300 ,000 long-term empty properties in England, which was, I think, up 14 % on the previous year. And that's not including second homes that are empty. There's a further 268 ,000 of those.

14:53The City of London tops it. So in the City of London, one in four are not in residential use. This includes second homes. Kensington and Chelsea is one in nine properties that are empty. and Westminster where Rutland Gate is, it's one in ten properties that are empty. I mean, London also has the most pressing housing needs. 1.3 million households waiting for somewhere to live in England, of which 340 ,000 are in London. So it has the highest number of empties and it has the most pressing housing needs. So who is buying these luxury properties? I mean, I'm thinking of the scene in Succession where they fly into London and they have this incredibly grand house that's just sort of readily available to them that they own, but clearly is vacated most of the time.

15:44Is that the kind of thing we're looking at? It's pretty accurate, I think. I mean, London's also the centre of offshore registered properties. So£80 billion worth of offshore registered property in the country. London's a hub of that with about 47 ,000 properties. And again, zooming in further on that, Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster are both really high on those lists. So to layman's terms, it means that there are lots of properties in this part of London which are owned by billionaires. We don't know where they are and they are currently empty. Right. Which sort of pulls into focus this political argument that's been running for some time, perhaps not under this current government, that pulling in the ultra wealthy overseas generates wealth for the broader city, the trickle-down theory, but do you think it's investment, that it's land banking?

16:42So I spoke to Roland Atkinson, who's a professor at Sheffield University, and he's wrote a really good book called Alpha City, How London Was Captured by the Superrich. He talks about them buying for two reasons, buying either just simply as a portfolio, something you just put on your property portfolio, or they do use them, but only use them for a few So they do literally just jet in on their private jets, get chauffeured into their places and go up in the lift and get service from the hotel next door. And they have no connection to the place they're living in, which is actually very much like the succession.

17:24Coming up, how can we stop people from buying homes just to leave them empty?

17:40so you've obviously spoken with a number of experts about this issue this particular property but having reported into unoccupied properties for some time what what are some of the solutions that experts are putting forward the reason is simple it's just we're building the wrong kinds of houses we're building luxury apartments and they they don't house either the homeless or poor people. I also spoke to Shelter, the charity for homelessness. And they actually came up with a plan of how to convert empty houses into social rent homes. And that included compulsory purchase, that means councils being able to just buy empty properties.

18:17Also disincentivising people having empty homes, obviously, you know, through taxes, that kind of stuff. And also providing councils with the funds to do that. I mean, no one's suggesting that a Westminster council is probably richer than most councils, but I don't think they have a spare 200 million to buy this. And although Rutland Gate is a stark picture of the situation, I don't think the solution is to buy it and open it up to social housing, probably. So Sam, the image at the heart of your piece is incredibly stark. A 210 million mega mansion in the heart of London with planning permission to build an underground car park, a three-story ballroom upstairs that is standing completely unoccupied.

18:59And meanwhile, you have Anders living in a tent of umbrellas on the porch outside, urinating into a plastic bottle. What was it like for you to see the reality of that wealth gap? It was incredibly stark and incredibly visible. I mean, you read about wealth gaps, you read about housing crisis, But I think you need, I mean, that's why we needed to kind of find a particular building and a particular person to do this story with, because you need that to kind of drive it home. That's all very well to have lots of figures about homelessness and wealth gaps and offshore property. But when you see it like that, it just, it puts it into absolute visceral terms.

19:46And that's why it felt like to me. obviously I mean Anders being slightly cheerful about it was unexpected but also charming as well I mean he's a very charming person. Why do you think these empty structures are such a powerful lens for looking at Britain now? I think empty buildings are fascinating because they tell stories of something that was and isn't anymore and that sort of paints a picture of decline and It could be decline of industry. It could be decline of the way we shop. It could be social habits. But it wasn't all kind of hopeless because as well as these empty buildings and stories, I met some extraordinary people.

20:27I mean, Anders is one of them, but I met a lovely couple in Wales who had been the last congregation in their church before it closed. And I met the last two people living in a tower block in Hackney. I met some extraordinary people, but people also who cared about it and they just wanted it to be better and they wanted things to get better. So it wasn't, I mean, it sounds like a really bleak project, but it was actually an incredibly rewarding project and I got a lot out of it. I made some friends like Anders. I mean, we text quite a lot now. He sends me pictures of new swans he's met. I'd love to see some of those.

21:06Thank you so much then. Thank you. That was Sam Wollaston, The Guardian's feature writer. I really recommend reading his written version of this story over at theguardian.com, which has some fabulous pictures. That's all for today. This episode was produced by Guy Zafman and Aisha Riaz and was presented by me, Lucy Half. The sound designer was Ross Burns and the executive producer is Elizabeth Kasson. We'll be back this afternoon with the latest.

21:37This is The Guardian.