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This is the Guardian. Today, the abandoned 210 million pound mansion and the rough sleeper who's made it his home. Support comes from wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global, your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose wise. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart, get wise. Download the wise app today. Teasing C's apply. It 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 there also said to be bullet proof, although I didn't get the chance to check that. 24 Italian marble bathrooms decorated. Guardian writer Sam Walliston has spent time outside one of the most expensive houses in the country. A vast terrace mansion in Knightsbridge. Very nice, bucking and 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. So, isn't a garden? You'd think for a true 110 million pounds they'd 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 is probably more interesting than the house itself. I have lived here for three years and every day I think surely tomorrow I'd be rescued, but rescue never comes, so it's now a token to him. It makes me realise that I'll strengthen all this. So who is the rough sleeper sleeping on the porch of this 210 million pound 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 Hough. Today in focus, life on the porch of an empty mansion. Sam Williston, 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 wealthy sleeps in front of. Tell me about him. So his name's Anders, and as fernstatt, he's Swedish, and he has lived here in the porch of this London mansion for the last three years. But 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 quite. 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. But I came in 2009, make loans for short. I came to this country, I mature, I stood at Edinburgh, but then it gardens. Really? Studying hot culture or something? Seriously. Forty culture and plantsmanship. Hotmanship is such a sweet little learn. Are you into gardens and stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I'm. 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 Markov, who was a New York Times tech writer, and he started doing some work for him. While he was there, he met the economists correspondent in California who told him that there was 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 was working remotely, and he was living on a small sale boat in an Essex estuary in a place called Muldon. 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. So 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 street link, 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 that stepping into the Colosseum. You know, world of unreportable crime. It was a sequence of hell, you know, hell has many layers as the Idanthe would have, right? So I started in the upper crust of hell. We're 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 into your victim? Yeah. The 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 on provoked. So I had to basically in the 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, particularly the swans, and he liked the area. I either. as one of my teachers in Adamic said, you either plant lover or an animal lover, you can't be both. And you were a pound of it? Yeah. Yeah. But the swan, see if we were horticulture, they don't do garden damage. Oh, do they not? No, they don't, I mean, they eat seaweed. Yeah. All right, so. Okay. Even the chicken can be trouble in the garden, because they will pick the wrong stuff and so on. So I felt justified. Yeah, yeah, it can be a swan man and horticulture, it's no problem. But then so you'd left. And wondering 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 would think if I had done, I'd 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. You could be in there. It's empty. Yeah, but how do you feel about that? What I said to myself is, it's like, it's like my. The pretend reality is, I'm the child, parents are in the house, I just said, can I, can I camp on the balcony? But why, 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? Yeah, I agree, but no, the fact that there's no downside. Yeah. So now it's like the. Like it's what you know, where do you want to sleep in your room, sun or in the tree house? Three hours, three hours, three hours! Three hours! A little bit like that. It is a bit like that. Yeah, no, I don't know either. He'd been in a few other places, he'd slept around a bit in London, and he thought this was. Yeah, as he says, he likes the area. And. 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, he's accumulated there. Sam, 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 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 ease. I've never had a GP. 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, I mean, you've got. You're infinitely better. So do you have a mattress? What have you got? Well, it's. I'm like the princess on the beach. It's like lyrical, lyrical goodness. Okay, and the practicality. He has a very kind of optimistic, positive outlook 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 drug habits. He says his health is good. He's mental health is good. There are obviously things that are not great for him. Like, he doesn't have a toilet. He has to use ones in the park. He 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 unnegative 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. It just seemed to sort of say so much. What did you learn as you started digging through who the owners of the property had to be in? 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 Raffi Careery, who went under, begun the Lebanese Prime Minister and he was assassinated in 2005 in a car bomb in Beirut. He. Careery had made his billions of building palaces for Saudi royal family. So probably because of that, the property passed into the hands of Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, who was the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia at the time, and he lived there for a while after 2005. He died in 2011 and it was actually then that we got the rest of it got sort of glimpsed inside it. Not that we weren't 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 being sold. So we had a kind of idea of the opulence that had been beyond that big door. Right. And so it's unvacated 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 pounds, which at the time was a record. It was the most expensive house in Britain. And 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 Evergrandt. Approximately perhaps. Yes. It was then actually for sale about two years later for a knockdown 200 million. So it was you can pick it up. It did not sell and Evergrandt went bankrupt. A Hong Kong court has ordered the liquidation of China Evergrandt. 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 Evergrandt has been given a winding up order by a court in Hong Kong. The company which has it. It'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. We found out that it was bought by Hui Ka Yan, who was Chinese richest man at the time. He was the founder of the Evergrandt property empire. Actually, I just looked on the company's house website. The name has been changed from Hui to his wife. Her name is Ding Yu Mei. They've since got divorced. So, we now know it's in Ding Yu Mei'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. That's not including second homes. So, empty, there's a further 268,000 of those. The city of London tops it. So, in the city of London, one in four are not in residential use. This includes second homes. Kensington, Chelsea is one in nine properties as empty and Westminster where Rotland Gate is, it's one in ten properties are empty. I mean, London also has the most pressing housing needs. 1.3 million households waiting for somebody 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. Is 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 pounds worth of offshore registered property in the country. London's a hub of that with about 47,000 properties and it gains zooming further on that. Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster are both really high on those and 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 to generate a wealth for the broader city that sort of check all down theory. But do you think it's investment that it's land banking? So, I spoke to Rola Natconcern who's a professor at Cheffield University and he's wrote a really good book called Alpha City. How London was captured by the super rich. He talks about them buying for two reasons, buying either just simply as a portfolio or something you just put on your property portfolio or they do use them but only use them for a few weeks a year. So, they do literally just jet in on their private jets, get shoved 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 and he just and which is actually very much like the succession. Coming up. How can we stop people from buying homes just to leave them empty? So, you've obviously spoken with a number of experts about the future of the country and the future of the country. So, 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 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 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. Also, just incentivising people having empty homes for obviously, you know, through taxes, that kind of stuff and also providing councils with a fund study that I mean no one's suggesting that Westminster Council is probably rich and 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, the image at the heart of your piece is incredibly stark, a 210 million mega-manction in the heart of London. with planning permission to build an underground car park, a three-story ballroom upstairs that is standing completely unoccupied. And meanwhile, you have Anders living in a tentative umbrella 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 puts it into absolute visceral terms. And that's why it felt that 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-bout buildings are fascinating because they tell stories of something that was and isn't anymore and that sort of paint-to-pitcher 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-bills and stories, I met some extraordinary people. I mean, Anders has 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 was, 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. Thank you so much, then. Thank you. That was Sam Walliston, 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's Aftman and Aisha Rheaz and was presented by me Lucy Hough. The sound designer was Ross Burns and the executive producer is Elizabeth Casson. We'll be back this afternoon with the latest. (upbeat music)