Billionaire’s massive castle, bigger than Buckingham Palace, left to rot away with no hope of saving it

The builder of Hamilton Palace, in southern England near the town of Uckfield, was British real estate magnate Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, 79 years old. A millionaire by age 22, he amassed a fortune of £800 million ($1.08 billion USD). In 1985, he decided to create this castle, which is now considered almost the “ghost house of East Sussex.”

According to the British media outlet Express, he is “rarely in Britain,” lives in Zimbabwe, and is said to have been friends with Robert Mugabe. Eccentric and elitist, he spent several years in prison for ordering a hand grenade attack on the house of a rabbi who supposedly owed him money. He was also found guilty and imprisoned in 2002 for homicide after a business rival was killed by two men at his doorstep in Sutton, Surrey (shot and stabbed five times in the chest), but that conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeals in July 2003, and he was released five months later.

Years ago, in 2016, he was asked to make his abandoned house available for homeless people, but he refused, calling it “one of the dirtiest burdens on public finances” and stating that many “became homeless due to lack of will or laziness.”

Signs at the castle’s entrance and throughout the property warn: “No Entry!”, CCTV recording, danger… Now it’s a party spot for local youth, who have found a free, open, huge place full of possibilities, without surveillance, in the purest style of Buckingham Palace. Neighbors say it has become a crime hotspot.

Besides Hamilton Palace, the magnate’s most imposing property, most of his holdings were in Sussex and were once managed from the Courtlands Hotel in Hove. He once said, “I own almost everything around here. And when I say ‘I own,’ I mean I own it; there’s no mortgage on anything. That’s one reason no one can tell me what to do. I don’t have to be nice to anyone.”

Van Hoogstraten was born in West Sussex in 1945. At 17, he left school and joined the merchant navy. By 22, he was known as Britain’s youngest millionaire, owning 350 properties. It’s said he acquired more than 2,000 properties during the 1980s real estate boom and sold 90% of them by the 1990s.

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