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Best of homes, worst of homes May 2017
Published 02 May 2023
From palatial mansions in Tehran, to a spy’s dank basement in Putney. Camila Batmanghelidjh recalls her varied housing experiences
During my childhood in Iran, I lived in palatial houses and the International Hotel, which my grandfather owned. They were very opulent places, but at the time I thought they were normal.
It was a happy time and there was a lot of making dens and playing. There were parties and every night we would be invaded by all sorts of colourful characters. We also had a house right by the Caspian Sea. You opened the doors, walked over the rocks and you were in the sea. When the Iranian revolution happened, my father was arrested and all his assets seized. I was at school in Dorset and was stranded with no money. I needed to find somewhere to live and ended up renting a room in the basement of a house in Putney, owned by what I later discovered was an MI6 man.
This was unquestionably my worst house. I fell in love with a tree outside the window, but the space itself was tiny. If you sat on the floor your trousers got soaked – that’s how damp it was. At the bottom of the cupboard there was a pool of water. If you missed the hanger and the dress fell off it got soaked. I spent two years there and it was really grotty.
I was an energetic character so I worked and worked and managed to save a bit of money to buy the flat in north London that I’m living in now. This is the best place I’ve ever lived. My childhood homes were palatial, but they didn’t have the spiritual atmosphere that this flat has. It belonged to an academic and he had wall-to-wall books. I think he liked me and thought ‘I want you to have this place’. So he sold it to me for £70,000 and I’ve been here for nearly 23 years now.
Although I love this flat, I’ve nearly lost it a couple of times because of my work. Once I used the money for my mortgage repayments to set up The Place 2Be, a charity providing therapy for children.
One day, I came out of the flat and the bailiffs were outside waiting to repossess it. The case was that day so I ran to the court and when the judge discovered that I had used the mortgage repayments to set up my charity, he told the building society that I would pay them back when I was ready. Then he told the building society to leave the court and turned round and said to me ‘are you for real, do you know what you’re doing?’ He was amazing. I’d love to find that judge again.
I then had to re-mortgage the flat when Kids Company, the charity I set up after The Place2Be, got evicted from under the railway arches in Peckham. The people trying to evict us called our funders and told them not to give us any more money.
The local authority kept saying that they would offer us an alternative building but they never did. I’m so angry about what happened. I had 400 children who were completely reliant on us and not a single politician came to represent them.
We had nowhere to go, no funding and we were being evicted. I just refused to move. The council turned up with a court order and I said you’d better bring a fork lift truck to move me because I’m not going anywhere. That stopped them.
Camila Batmanghelidjh is the founder and leader of Kids Company. She spoke to Bill Rashleigh
