Sam Wollaston
speaker
167 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
Sam Wollaston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
The property itself is 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 billions 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.
And 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.
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.
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 Evergrande.
Appropriately, perhaps.
It was then actually for sale about two years later for a knockdown 200 million.
Showing 81–100 of 167 · page 5 of 9
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