Last week I was AV-teching at a conference held by these guys in London: Camelot Property Management – Camelot The live-in Guardian company
They’re a Dutch company who are expanding their operations into the UK. They offer a building management service whereby owners of disused buildings (warehouses, factories, hospitals, whatever) who are worried about their properties being vandalised/robbed/squatted/partied can sign up to the scheme and Camelot will do the place up and rent it as very cheap accommodation. The idea is that having tenants in the property looking after it will prevent it from being broken into, and at the same time provides the country with much-needed affordable housing – renting one of these places in London typically costs about £200pcm. If you live in one of their properties you won’t exactly have the same rights as a ‘proper’ tenant; you can get kicked out at very short notice if the owner decides to sell the building, but at the same time you’re not tied into a fixed-term tenancy and you’ll get to live in a really interesting building.
It seems to me like a really pragmatic use of otherwise redundant buildings. Ok, the whole point of the company is to make money by preventing raves but at the end of the day I think using a vacant property as cheap accommodation is much more socially useful than partying it in the name of anarchy/hedonism so I say fair play to them. I think I’m going to see what they have on offer in Bristol.
Anyone else heard of this/know anyone who lives in a similar arrangement?
(As an aside, it was interesting to hear from the head of a security firm in London who said that squat parties are the biggest problem he faced nowadays – a single night of partying in one of the properties he managed resulted in £40,000 of damage to the windows alone; graffiti, walls kicked through and other damage brought the figure up to more like £100,000! He had lots of photos of raves in his presentation (I was trying to see if I could recognise any of them).)
