by Mike Walsh
Van Hoogstraten was bursting with excitement about the project. Journalists were driven personally by him to Browne’s office in Islington, north London, to be shown the model. Van Hoogstraten claimed to have designed most of it himself. It would be the largest private residence built in over a century, he enthused.
The interior was to be of Carrara marble. There was to be a majestic central staircase and outside a series of waterfalls would lead to a five-acre lake and a boathouse. Across the water would be a bandstand. The walls were to be three and a half feet thick, and the foundations – incredibly – 150 feet deep.
Van Hoogstraten knew what he wanted. He described being inspired by Buckingham Palace. ‘I went there when I was in my late teens to collect some items from King George V’s stamp collection. When you go in initially it’s through what looks like a medieval flagstone courtyard area which extends into the ground floor. Then, when you go up that grand staircase, you are in what I presume is the formal salon and you’re hit with what all the money in the world can’t buy… I wanted to replicate that impression you get.’
The style he finally settled on was a form of English baroque created by Browne. The house consists of a central block surmounted by a dome with a bronze cupola and two wings with their own smaller cupolas.
Some ridiculed Van Hoogstraten’s dream and sneered at the design as a tasteless pastiche. Punch called it a folly. The Daily Star called it ‘The Devil’s Palace’. An Evening Argus reporter labelled it ‘Hoogstraten’s Toad Hall’.
But others reserved judgement or were even prepared to be impressed. One of the leading authorities on the English country house, John Martin Robinson, said that what Van Hoogstraten was planning was ‘a serious house … not just interesting … but pretty staggering’. Interviewed by the Independent, Robinson said the High Cross house was neither a slavish copy nor a pastiche. Would it be a great building? he was asked. ‘That’s hard to say… I wouldn’t have thought so. If you don’t get classical detail absolutely right it has a tendency to degenerate into kitsch.’ He thought that the best definition might be ‘Post-modern classical with a dash of megalomania’.
This was hardly surprising given the client. Tony Browne had great fun presenting Van Hoogstraten with humorous options for the architectural style that might be adopted. One drawing depicted Van Hoogstraten as the Statue of Liberty – entitled ‘The Statue of Taking Liberties’. Hoogstraten enjoyed the joke.
There had always, of course, been more than a dash of megalomania about the owner of the estate. At High Cross it would find full expression – and not just in the huge palace Van Hoogstraten was bent on creating.
He began to gather round himself his own version of a court. He took to staying in the lodge on the estate. Later he made it his main home in England. Members of his inner circle – some of them the heavies he employed – were offered homes in cottages in and around the estate. Half a dozen, with their wives and families, moved into ‘grace and favour’ cottages.
Others on the firm who didn’t find a place there – or didn’t want one – started calling High Cross ‘the funny farm’. Van Hoogstraten appreciated the joke. He guffawed.
Browne had seen Van Hoogstraten in purple underpants. He wore a lot of purple. His most recent girlfriend, Tanaka Sali, told us: ‘Yes, he likes purple. He wears a purple ring and a purple armband. He told me it was a royal colour and he regards himself as royalty, and that’s why he’s building himself a palace.’
It would take several years for work on the palace to begin. Then, after it had begun, Van Hoogstraten decided on a final royal touch. He would have a mausoleum included – not for his family but for him alone.
The mausoleum, built of thick concrete, would be under the palace itself. It would be designed to last two thousand years, he announced. On his death his body would be entombed there, along with some of his priceless works of art. As for the palace, it would be closed up around the mausoleum and left with all its contents.
No one was sure whether to take him seriously. Did he really mean it? Or was this another wind-up in the game that he has been playing with the outside world all his adult life. Or was it something that began as a wind-up but ended in him taking it seriously. It was never clear.
He gave the authors one version in 1997: ‘The mausoleum initially started as a joke. I certainly don’t want to be cremated and I don’t like the idea of being put in someone else’s ground where even if you’ve bought the plot they come along fifty years later and dig you up and chuck you away and turn it over to a housing estate. So I think the safest thing is to be buried on your own land and inside a building that can’t be destroyed … and I like the idea of some kind of memorial.’
Two years later he gave a souped-up version to Martin Bashir of ITV. ‘What do you propose to accommodate in here?’ the reporter asked him near the steps disappearing down into the mausoleum.
‘Well, me for a start, plus certain important personal artifacts… That may be a form of insanity, filling it with priceless works of art and treasures. I suppose really it’s the nearest I can get to taking all my wealth with me and ensuring that nobody benefits from it.’
Van Hoogstraten’s real wealth is hard to gauge. He likes to give different answers at different times to different people. It is a game he plays. Obfuscation, fantasy and misinformation feed the Van Hoogstraten mystique. In 1988 he told the authors he was worth £100 million. By 2002 he was saying that one of his collections alone was worth £200 million. One former business associate says mischievously that as Van Hoogstraten likes to exaggerate, every number he mentions should be ‘divided by ten’.
According to the Sunday Times, which publishes a list of the richest people in Britain, by 1997 he was worth £160 million. The following year, the newspaper put the sum at £200 million. And there it stayed until 2002, when it estimated his wealth to have declined to £185 million.
At lunch with the authors, Van Hoogstraten made fun of the Rich List’s estimates. He laughed as he posed the rhetorical question, ‘Where did I lose that £15 million?’ before answering himself with a snort, ‘I’ve probably lost more than that in Africa alone.’
As Van Hoogstraten has large investments in Africa, one can assume that this rare admission does indeed mean that his fortune has been recently declining. One former friend puts his wealth at a figure as low as £30 million, but the true amount must be higher. There was a time in his glory days when he made more than that in a year.
9
SCUMBAGS
If ever there was a decade for the property speculator it was the 1980s. Thanks largely to government policy, house prices rocketed. Smart dealers like Van Hoogstraten foresaw what was coming and grabbed every property they could lay their hands on before prices really took off. In the space of just two years he bought and sold at least two hundred properties and made an astonishing amount of money – as much as £80 million, according to one source close to him. In the process he displayed a nonchalant ruthlessness that capped his reputation as the heir to Peter Rachman. One newspaper called Van Hoogstraten ‘the devil’s landlord’.
The price explosion was set off by radical changes in government housing policy following the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. A central plank of a revolution which Mrs Thatcher envisaged was the transformation of Britain into a nation of owner-occupiers. Everything would be done to help people buy their own homes. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t buy could largely be catered for by private landlords – private landlords freed from rent controls.
It was manna from heaven for the property world. Not only could property dealers anticipate a bonanza from rising house prices but, if rent controls went, there were good times ahead for everyone renting out.
Mrs Thatcher rapidly became the one living politician Van Hoogstraten had time for. Twenty years later he is still an ardent fan.
Step one for the Iron Lady was to sell off council housing, then the bedrock of housing provision. Local councils we
re forced to offer their houses to their tenants at substantial discounts. Next, building societies were encouraged to provide easy loans. Then, bit by bit, tenants’ rights began to be curtailed.
Owner-occupation did rocket, just as the government hoped. But part of the price was a new era of Rachmanism. Ruthless developers grabbed every tenanted building they could get and tried to ‘winkle’ out their tenants and convert their bedsits into homes for owner-occupiers.
Winkling meant getting the tenant out by fair means or foul – a few thousand pounds in compensation for the lucky, harassment for the rest. A measure of the scale of the winkling is that between 1981 and 1984 the numbers of privately rented properties in London dropped by sixty-eight thousand. Some of that was slum clearance but a great deal was due to rapacious developers.
Whole areas of the capital were ‘gentrified’ in this way – notably the bedsitlands of Kensington, Camden, Maida Vale and Notting Hill. Even the most God-fearing institutions were tempted by the pickings to be had and stuck their snouts in the trough. In South Kensington one of the big landlords is the Henry Smith Charitable Estate. It was founded three hundred and fifty years ago to help the poor. Come the 1980s, the charity was suddenly revealed to be helping the rich. Its properties in some of London’s most upmarket addresses – places like Onslow Square – were being sold to developers who then hustled their tenants out. Examples reached MPs, who took the issue up on the floor of the House of Commons, but to no avail. Much the same was said to be happening with other respectable landlords. Winklers were reported to have got their hands on Church Commission houses near Regent’s Park and Eton College properties in Swiss Cottage.
Tenants’ rights groups protested. One produced a pamphlet featuring the story of a blind Irish lady in her seventies, whose home had been in an Edwardian block of flats off Gloucester Road, South Kensington. An ex-hospital cleaner, she had lived there for some twenty years. She learned that the block had a new owner, a developer, who told her she would have to get out. He gave her ‘compensation’ – £120. With no idea that she might have legal rights to keep her home, she didn’t argue. Some weeks later a charity worker found her, dying of pneumonia in a tiny, unheated room with a broken window. A TV reporter working on a story about winkling discovered that the old lady’s previous home and the rooms next to it had been converted into one huge apartment. It had become the home of the chairman of the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey, and his wife, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. They would have known nothing, of course, about the dead Irishwoman whose home was now theirs.
The tenants’ protests got nowhere. An all-party committee of MPs pressed the government to investigate but it refused. The winkling and the profit-taking gathered pace. According to a survey conducted by the Greater London Council, in one year alone around sixteen thousand private tenants in London suffered ‘significant harassment’ at the hands of their landlords.
Van Hoogstraten had to be careful in getting on to this new Rachmanite gravy train. His tax problems with the Inland Revenue hamstrung him. For a long time he needed to minimise his holdings on paper and not be seen to be a buyer. But secretly he and his front men began buying tenanted blocks across London and on the south coast.
The news of his expansion in Brighton and Hove eventually leaked out. In September 1983 every private tenant in the area must have felt a thrill of panic on reading the article the Evening Argus headlined: ‘Van Hoogstraten’s buying spree’. The report underneath revealed that Brighton’s most notorious landlord was planning to buy as much tenanted property as he could. By now Van Hoogstraten had settled with the Inland Revenue and so could admit he was a big buyer. He told the reporter that the only constraint on how much he’d buy was availability. In Hove there just wasn’t enough property on estate agents’ books.
For once Van Hoogstraten tried to sound reassuring. He explained to the Argus that his reputation was undeserved. It was based on allegations made against him in the past. There were hundreds of tenants of his in Brighton and Hove who lived peacefully without any talk of harassment. Those who were about to become his tenants had nothing to fear.
‘The idea is to buy property with people living in it, wait twenty years if necessary until it becomes vacant and then sell it on with vacant possession to a builder for renovation or redevelopment.’ It hardly needs to be said that it didn’t work out that way for all his new tenants.
Most of those in the buildings he began to snap up wouldn’t have known immediately that they had become a Van Hoogstraten tenant. He admitted to the Argus that all the purchases would be through nominees. ‘I don’t intend to buy anything in my own name.’ His reason? He didn’t want tenants to become worried because he was their new landlord.
In reality his policy was to use front companies and front people in all his operations, the moneylending and investment companies as well as property. One man whom he used for years as a front, Lebanese-born property millionaire Michaal Abou Hamdan, says: ‘Nick always wanted barriers between him and the deal.’
At first Van Hoogstraten concentrated the buying spree in Brighton and Hove. Over a couple of years he and his front men gobbled up almost every house that came on to the market in the quietly respectable avenues just north of the Hove seafront. First, Second, Third and Fourth Avenues and The Drive are parallel with each other, running from the Prom to Western Road, the commercial heart of Hove. The houses are double-fronted, four-storey mansions. They were built in yellow brick with lacy ironwork balconies and high windows. Before the 1980s the Avenues were bathchair country. Retired folk with small pensions made their final homes there. Students and single people rented furnished rooms or flats. These places were Van Hoogstraten’s targets. By the middle of the decade he appeared to own almost everything in First and Second Avenues and many of the mansions in the parallel streets as well.
He bought extensively in up-and-coming areas of west London too, like Notting Hill and Maida Vale, and in those that were already upmarket, like Holland Park. As in Brighton and Hove, he tended to go for Victorian and Edwardian buildings. However run down or neglected they were, he knew they would be solidly built and once emptied would command premium prices. ‘Quality, I always go for quality,’ he explained. ‘The Victorians and Edwardians built solidly. I wanted substantial buildings.’ Some he ‘thieved’ for a few thousand pounds. Some cost hundreds of thousands, but he knew that they were potentially worth five or ten times as much.
Rachman’s tactics weren’t needed most of the time. Some buildings Van Hoogstraten decided to hang on to, and he was happy to keep them tenanted. Of those where this wasn’t the case, some emptied naturally as people died or moved on. In the rest, where he wanted tenants out as soon as possible, he tended to pursue a policy of malign neglect. It was purposely designed to wear the residents out. Repairs would not be done. Heating bills would not be paid. When tenants complained, they would be ignored. If they persisted they would be abused or worse. Van Hoogstraten knew that some tenants would respond by withholding their rent. When they did that he immediately went for an eviction order, and he usually secured it. The law insists that you pay your rent whatever hell your landlord visits on you.
When none of that worked – and Van Hoogstraten was determined to get a stubborn tenant out – all kinds of Rachmanite things could happen.
One was the sudden arrival of the neighbours from hell – thunderously noisy and partying all night. Many were drop-outs and drug addicts whom Van Hoogstraten’s henchmen had dredged up. He himself specially liked employing Rastafarians. He always got on well with Afro-Caribbeans and made a number of black friends. For a low rent – sometimes a rent-free flat – many were only too happy to move into whatever house he nominated and deliberately turn life there into a nightmare for everyone else.
It was harassment by another name. Occasionally it sparked incidents that reached the courts. In January 1983 an ex-policeman called Stefan Harnisch was arrested after a fight in Hove. He was searched by police and fou
nd to be carrying a knife. He claimed that it was for protection against thugs who were harassing tenants in a block of eight flats that Van Hoogstraten had bought in Cromwell Road, Hove, a few months earlier. ‘Van Hoogstraten … hired a dozen blacks who moved in with records and amplifiers,’ Harnisch claimed in court. The object was to get the tenants out. Harnisch said that he had challenged the leader of the gang and that he was now in fear of being attacked. The knife was confiscated and Harnisch was fined £50.
Mostly what went on behind the front doors of Van Hoogstraten’s expanding empire never saw the light of day – like the slow, grubby war of attrition his henchmen waged against Violet Lamont. She had lived at 32b First Avenue, a basement flat, since 1961. A feisty, pretty little lady, she had brought up six sons in India, where her husband was in the colonial service. Her flat was spacious and opened on to its own garden. She was very happy there. Among her friends in the house was a dentist called Paul Lahaise, who had his surgery on the ground floor immediately above Violet.
Life changed for Violet at the beginning of the eighties when a company owned by Van Hoogstraten bought the house. She learned that the new owners wanted her and everyone else out. The flat had been her home for some twenty years, she was a protected tenant and she said no. Most of the other residents were more compliant than she was or they were scared. One by one they disappeared. Soon the entire building was empty except for Violet and Paul Lahaise. He, too, refused to go. So Van Hoogstraten’s men got to work on the two of them.
A new set of tenants moved into the first floor. Paul and Violet were soon made to realise that their new neighbours were drug addicts. Used syringes were dropped down into the basement areas. Strange people called. Music thumped endlessly. The colonial servant’s widow and the dentist stuck it out. Then the landlord found Paul Lahaise’s weak spot – his practice. Heavy wardrobes were moved into the passageway leading to the surgery and they were left there. The wardrobes virtually blocked the entrance. Patients had to squeeze past them or couldn’t get in at all. Months went by. The practice suffered. Finally Lahaise told his fellow tenant that he had had enough and he was going.