by Mike Parker
Dave writes a good letter; over the years, he’s had a few printed in the Guardian, the Independent, Private Eye and the Surrey Advertiser. He’d become an active member of the Ramblers’ and the Open Spaces Society, and diligently lobbied politicians and council officials about blocked paths and the debate over the right to roam. One case had excited him over all others, had reminded him of his red-hot, long-lost beliefs. He wrote letters to MPs, councillors and one terribly wry one that he was thrilled to see printed in the Observer. He’d even driven down to Sussex, in his and Maureen’s tiny Fiat, to join a demonstration of ramblers, under police protection, as they attempted to walk the notorious path that had been blocked by the man Dave hated more than any other on Earth. More than Jeremy Clarkson. More even than Thatcher.
Every pantomime needs its villain, and in the long-running Cinderella that is the story of the rambling movement, no rapscallion ever came with a more dastardly swank and hollower cackle than Nicholas van Hoogstraten. The battle over the Sussex footpath past his home near Uckfield occupied more column inches, drew more protestors and caused more fury than any since Kinder Scout. There were a lot of Daves out there, and they rose as one. To the local authority, East Sussex County Council, the Hoogstraten path is known as Framfield 9 – even the name sounded like a gang of imprisoned hostages or victims of a miscarriage of justice. Free the Framfield 9!
Where do you start with Hoogstraten? The name, perhaps, for the ‘van’ is, of course, pure affectation. And that’s not his only name, for he has admitted to using up to 20 aliases, reportedly including Nicholas Hamilton, Dr Karl Brunner, Paul Clark and Reza Ghadamian. According to a 2009 report in The Times, when Hoogstraten was cleared, on technicalities, of charges in Harare of illegal currency dealing and possession of pornography (many of the images included Old Nick himself with his latest Zimbabwean squeeze), he changed his name by deed poll. Changed it to – cue blanket green lighting and a thunderclap – Adolph von Hessen. He’s behind you!
Perhaps I should let him paint his own portrait, for he’s not been shy of speaking up. On his upbringing: ‘My mother was just an object, something I inherited. She used to wind my father up by telling him what a bastard I was. The only relationship I had with her was: “Give me some money.”’ Or that of his own five children, by three different mothers (‘Once you’ve had black, you never go back’), none of whom were deemed suitable Mrs van H material (‘Do I look stupid?’). One of his broodmares said that when her waters broke on a valuable carpet, he ordered her to clean it immediately: ‘Of course. It was a blooming twelve thousand pound Persian silk carpet. When one owns art one has to be a custodian of it. She was only the carrier of my child. Anyway, the baby didn’t come for ages.’
His business methods are even less savoury. At its height, his empire included 2,000 properties, mainly in London and Brighton, and thousands of tenants, or ‘riff-raff’ as he preferred to call them. Evicting a tenant once, he allegedly assisted in hurling their furniture out of the window, describing it as ‘the best bit of fun I’ve had in ages’. Others were beaten up, or came home to find staircases and roofs removed: ‘That was just amusement,’ he explains. ‘Entertainment. Of course I threaten tenants on a daily basis. It’s perfectly legal; people have got to pay their rent.’ In 1968, he was imprisoned for ordering the firebombing of one of his tenants, a Jewish holy man. When he came out of prison, he allegedly kidnapped his own accountant, who he claimed had stolen £140,000 from him: ‘Look, I was justified. I took him to Paris and locked him in a property I own there for two years. I fed him on sardines and biscuits and he worked for me until he’d repaid the debt.’ The properties with which he was linked were often in a shocking state of disrepair. Five people died in an arson attack on a third-floor flat in Hove in 1992. There was no fire escape, a fact that the council had repeatedly reported, although they had found it nigh on impossible to prove actual ownership of the property, as, true to form, this was vested in a labyrinthine network of stooges and paper companies. He wasted no time in mourning the dead, however, describing them as ‘lowlife, drug dealers, drug takers and queers – scum’.
Previous convictions included demanding money with menaces, forcible entry, bribery, handling stolen goods, assault and contempt of court. In 2002, he was convicted of the manslaughter of a business associate, Mohammed Raja, who was stabbed and then shot in the face by hired hitmen in front of his grandchildren. He was sentenced to ten years, but freed on appeal after a year in Belmarsh. ‘Raja was nothing,’ he said then. ‘If I had a list of people I wanted executed that maggot wouldn’t even have figured.’ He was contemptuous of the dead man’s family for seeking compensation from him (‘They’re a bunch of shit-bags, they always were’), and the way that he had been brought to trial (‘The police and judiciary are dishonest and incompetent. They fitted me up. I had to keep my mouth shut during the trial but now I’m going to fuck the lot of them’).
In 1985, he began building a lavish mansion on a site he – or rather, an opaque network of companies – owned near Uckfield. The largest private house to be built in Britain in the twentieth century was to be his mausoleum and the home for his art collection. Rumours swirled that it was a retirement home for Robert Mugabe, whom Hoogstraten had described as ‘a hundred per cent decent and incorruptible’. Planning permission was only granted a decade later, not that such civic niceties ever made much difference to Hoogstraten. And as for a public footpath running through the estate, well, that was beyond irrelevant. He blocked it with a padlocked fence, two lines of barbed wire, a vast shed built right across it, and a stack of old refrigerator units piled high.
A seemingly unassuming, if steely, woman called Kate Ashbrook was to be his nemesis. She has been perhaps the most dogged of all access campaigners in the last 30 years, as full-time General Secretary of the Open Spaces Society since 1984, trustee and twice national Chairman of the Ramblers’ Association, and with her fingers in the wholemeal pies of almost every other organisation involved in access to the countryside. It was Kate who, on 10 February 2003, wielded the bolt clippers that first freed the Framfield 9, some 13 years after it had been so thoroughly blocked off. It had been a long, expensive, explosive saga.
I invited Kate to come and walk Britain’s most notorious footpath with me. It was her first visit since those heady days of 2003, and the pride was still etched on her face as she showed me the various flashpoints. She had taken the action personally against Hoogstraten, and then against East Sussex County Council when they cravenly caved into him and agreed to divert the path, ploughing tens of thousands of pounds of her own money into the fight. It was worth every penny. ‘The Hoogstraten case was brilliant,’ she said, ‘because he was just evil. You need people like that, because then you can explain the issues to folk really clearly.’
If it sounds unwise to be speaking so ill of the undead, then she probably need not worry, for Hoogstraten seems to have disappeared from the Sussex landscape. His unfinished monster mansion, its copper domes glinting over the hedgerows, sits gathering dust and damp, and the black-suited security guards that used to surround both him and the estate have vanished. I’m excited – hugely so – to see it for myself, for villainous bling on a scale this monumental is a rare commodity in our modest little land. The mansion reminds me of somewhere I’ve seen recently, and then I remember. It’s the Trafford Centre, but as built by Nicolae Ceauşescu. Fantasic. I mean, awful. Terrible. But, gosh, absolutely fascinating.
Once the footpath battle started raging, Hoogstraten ploughed into ramblers with the same panto gusto as every other opponent he’d ever faced. ‘What kind of people go rambling? Perverts,’ he declaimed to Lynn Barber in the Observer. It was a theme he returned to regularly, telling a journalist from the Independent, ‘You ask any policeman, he’ll tell you. They’re what we call the dirty mac brigade. Flashers. Very few decent upright citizens, people who pay their rates, taxes and have a house they own, are anything to do with the Ramblers’ Association.’
It sure did the trick. That outraged letter from my mythical Dave would have been one of the 5,000 that poured in to the Lewes headquarters of East Sussex County Council, although only 166 of these came from residents of the county itself. It could be seen, I say to Kate, as the ramblers’ jungle-drum beating, the indignant rent-a-rant of people who probably write a couple of letters of complaint every week about something or other. She’s not having that. Locals were terrified to speak out, she says, and indeed one official at the county council, which was supposed to enforce the right of way, said that his officers were ‘scared to death’ of Hoogstraten. You would be, I’m sure. But no local residents, not one from Palehouse Common, the hamlet by the path’s blocked entrance, or Framfield or Uckfield, came out in support of the ramblers. In fact, as Kate admits, they ‘rather hated us. They didn’t like the intrusion, or the parking problems, or the press.’
Much as he would be loath to admit it, Hoogstraten was a pawn in a game whose rules were set by Kate and the Ramblers’ Association. They were every bit as ruthless as him, but considerably smarter (not that it’s much of a competition; read a few interviews with Hoogstraten, and intellectual capacity is not what springs to mind). The path was first reported as blocked to East Sussex County Council in 1989 by a local RA member. Despite his repeated protestations, nothing was done. It was only in December 1998 that the national RA realised that it was Hoogstraten’s land that this path ran across; his growing notoriety (and growing mansion) meant that they had found their perfect poster boy. They invited campaigning journalist John Sweeney (he who lost it with the Scientologists on Panorama) to come and see for himself; he wrote up his experience in the Observer of climbing the fence and being told again and again to ‘fuck off’ by a security guard. It was good timing: the piece appeared on Sunday, 3 January 1999, just as thousands were strapping on their boots and heading out for a muddy New Year country walk. The story spread like wildfire, in the liberal and conservative press alike. The debate around the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill was going on in Parliament, and occupying much space in the media too. Landowners were being lined up by various countryside organisations to splutter indignantly about the iniquities of the planned legislation, but nothing they could come up with could compete with the ‘Evil Monster of Uckfield’ and his downtrodden ramblers. Hoogstraten was the best weapon the RA could have prayed for, and they deployed him with strategic precision. When Mohammed Raja was murdered in July 1999, and Hoogstraten’s collar felt in response, the RA, while doubtless mumbling all the right noises of sympathy, must have thought that all their Christmases had come at once.
Kate and I set out to walk Framfield 9. It’s about a mile long, disgorging on to the A22 after crossing through the grounds of a country hotel and equestrian centre. Ironically, four years after Kate had victoriously snipped through the barbed wire at the other end, the hotel blocked the path with a dung heap and a fenced-off car park, and the Ramblers were off again. Today, it’s a clear run through, if a little ambiguously waymarked in the hotel grounds. I have to say, though, it’s not the greatest of walks. Press reports back at the height of Hoogstratenmania made it sound like an Elysian paradise, a gentle canter through Merrie England, with skies unbounded and glorious views over the Downs. In truth, the path crosses a couple of scratty fields, a claustrophobic little wood, a slippy footbridge in a thicket of weeds and the truly uninspiring grounds of the hotel. The only thing that makes it even slightly interesting is the occasional view of Château Hoogstraten.
That’s not the point, I know. It’s the principle of the thing. Which is why the diversion, as proposed by Hoogstraten’s proxy company, and eagerly accepted by terrified county council officials, was never going to be acceptable to Kate and the thousands that cheered her on. ‘It’s not the proper route,’ she tells me firmly. ‘The proper route is the original route that generations of people have used. It should be a lovely straight walk from Framfield to . . . to wherever it was going, but you can see here that it wouldn’t have been.’ So does that mean that all footpath diversions should be so stoutly resisted? She thinks for a moment and is prepared to concede that the only diversions that might possibly be justified are those that re-route some footpaths out of farm yards. A little later, over a pint in a particularly nasty nearby pub, she elaborates on the point. ‘Paths are our history; they’re absolutely fascinating. They show where people used to walk and ride, and the great thing is that, in most cases, they are undisturbed, so that even if they don’t make much sense today, they’re there for a reason – which is why I don’t like paths being mucked about with, just for the benefit of some private person.’
Her passion is astonishing. Her bravado too, when you consider how Hoogstraten was inclined to treat his adversaries. She’s been doing this for three decades and more, and travels thousands of miles every year to support local campaigns, speak at meetings, lobby councils, gee up the troops, confront recalcitrant landowners and be the public face of an issue that’s both deeply complicated yet barely flickers across the radar of most people. I ask her if she thinks things have improved during her span. ‘It has changed,’ she replies. ‘It used to be very, very negative, but after the CROW Act, landowners saw that actually public access to land didn’t cause the kind of damage they thought it would, so they have moved a bit, and they also recognise the benefits to the economy that accrues. They can’t rely on farming any more; they have to diversify, so they do see that it may be quite a good thing. They have moved a bit, I think.’ She tails off, and I detect something almost regretful in her tone. ‘The battle’s much harder to fight now,’ she continues, carefully measuring out her words, ‘because it’s nothing like as black and white these days. Landowners used to be really quite evil. I was always going on the Today programme and having a real knockabout with the president of the CLA [the Country Land & Business Association, formerly the Country Landowners’ Association], but it just doesn’t work like that any more. They’ve moved more in our direction.’ ‘And maybe you’ve moved a little in theirs too,’ I suggest. ‘I don’t know about that. I hope not.’
Luckily for Kate, before we leave Framfield 9, I ask if we can go and have a little wander along the footpath’s continuation to the north of the lane. It’s a mess. Broken stiles with vicious-looking electric cabling pinned to them, and the path forced into an almost impenetrable nettle-and-bramble-filled ditch. Kate whips out her camera and snaps away, her eyes gleaming. Two days later, she sends me copies of emails between her and the Rights of Way officer at East Sussex County Council in which she is demanding action, and he is promising it. You would, you really would.
As we walk back to her car, she positively scurries past a nearby farm. ‘They’re not friendly at all,’ she sidemouths to me. When we get to a safer distance away, she turns back and points out the paddock jumps and overdone hanging baskets. ‘See, horsey types. Nouveau riche. It’s them that are the trouble, it’s always them. They just think that if they spend enough money, they can buy their privacy. Well, they can’t.’
It’s not a unique – nor indeed a new – observation. I heard it countless times from the footpath and access activists that I met, the strident belief that it’s the nouveau riche that are ruining the countryside. It’s why Nick van Hoogstraten became such a pin-up for them, for he was the physical manifestation of all the avarice and arrogance that so many ramblers are certain lurk beneath every sharp suit and brassy hairdo. They point at the garish gates, mock the mock-Tudor treble garage and raise their eyes in horror at the security cameras, blacked-out SUVs and leylandii.
I sympathise, of course I do. I’m as much of a snob as the next Archers listener, but it’s something I do try and rein in a little, for I’m frankly quite scared of what lies a bit further down that particular path. Whereas the great access battles around the northern cities were driven by a highly ideological class war, almost everywhere else – here in southern England in particular – they seem to have been powered by regular
surges of good old British snobbery; one, furthermore, that tends to come from both sides of the political spectrum. Left-leaning access campaigners and bluff old right-wing landowners are as one on the subject, as they put aside their differences and gang up instead on those in between.
Was it ever thus. I remembered the nouveau riche rage of Ralph ‘Vegetable’ Wright in Flixton, a fit of pique that had proved to be the inadvertent midwife of the rights of way campaign movement. And I was reminded of the 1938 Commons debate on the Access to Mountains Bill, when the ‘person in the motor car’, the Rolls-Royce in particular, had become the bogey figure of the day and all-purpose cipher for flash, brash and thoroughly reprehensible. Joshua Ritson, the ex-miner turned Labour MP for Durham, started it off with: ‘There are landlords and landlords, but we are getting now a new class of landlord. I have always paid and shall always pay tribute to the old aristocratic families, who never bothered at all about these matters, but now we are getting some new ones, the quick-rich gentlemen, who can afford to have more gamekeepers than there is game on the job. As I said upstairs, we have some Americans now, and they are as boisterous as they always are . . . I agree that it is the people with motor cars whom we are up against most of all and that they are the people who do the damage, but is that any reason why we should punish the poor people who never get a breath of fresh air, but whom we are now beginning to allow to do so? They always behave themselves, and I think the people in the motor cars are more dangerous than anything else by breaking bottles on the roadside and dropping their cigarettes and other things that are more dangerous than cigarettes. They are a danger to the country generally, and they should be taught decent manners when they are out in the country places. They go and tear up wild flowers, and yet our people have to suffer because these other people cannot behave themselves.’