Life on the porch of an empty mansion
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Today, the abandoned £210 million mansion and the rough sleeper who's made it his home.
It has 45 rooms, four lifts, a swimming pool. One of my favorite 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 decorated.
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? You'd think for 210 million pounds 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. But rescue never comes. So now we're talking to him, it makes me realise how strange it all is.
Who is Anders and why is a rough sleeper living on the porch of a £210m Knightsbridge mansion?
So 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 Hough. Today in Focus, life on the porch of an empty mansion. Sam 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. 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. 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 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. While he was there, he met the Economist's correspondent in California who told him that there were some jobs going in London, and he agreed. 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 sailboat in an Essex estuary in a place called Malden.
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