Harry John Hyams is the son of a bookmaker. In 1945 at the age of 17 he joined a firm of estate agents to spend fourteen valuable years learning the business, and mixing with the right people in the right restaurants. In 1959 Hyams was ready to go it alone. He bought a run down property company, Oldham Estate and used this as a spring board to launch a series of deals that sent Oldham Estates capital rocketing upwards. His method was very simple. Buy some old buildings; pull them down; build a new one, usually an office block; keep it empty for as long as possible while rents rise; then sell a lease for an enormous profit. The building contractors were usually George Wimpey who also owns 40% of the Company with 10% of the share capital. Yes, the Co-op own 10% of Centre Point. company. Other finance came from the Westminster Bank and the Co-operative Insurance Hyams personal fortune is now close to thirty million pounds. His home in Wiltshire, Ramsbury Manor, cost well over half a million and with its priceless furniture, Georgian silver, guard dogs, security men and Rolls Royce number HJH 1 in the driveway, it pictures, collection of makes the Beatles' houses look like prefabs. Hyams blocks are dotted all over London but the most controversial of them all is the one that looks like becoming the most profitable single building ever promoted in this country: Centre Point. It is a high handsome office block located at the junction of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street. The circumstances surrounding its completion are complicated and in some respects scandalous. The L.C.C., as it was then, wanted to build a roundabout but could not afford to buy the property around the crossroads. So through an introduction made by Lord Goodman (friend of Harold Wilson and now tinpot dictator of the ridiculous Arts Council) a deal was made between Hyams and the L.C.C. whereby in return for getting the land for its roundabout (which was never land to Hyams had no idea that he'd got permission to build a skyscraper and some of them sold built Hyams got planning permission to build Centre Point. Of course the people who sold their ridiculously cheaply. But then we traditionally don't care when big gangsters carve little gangsters up. By March 1962 Hyams had bought all the property in the area: given the L.C.C. the bits they wanted: and signed a lease for 150 years at a rent of £18,500 a year. This was Harry's biggest stroke for the rent was FIXED. The absolutely normal provision for rent reviews every few years omission has been described by the financial editor of The Times as "scandalously unbusinesslike" that we all have to face and that is usually present in all L.C.C. contracts was MISSING. This and he has calculated that the loss to the London Authority is something in the region of 13 million pounds.
The total cost of building Centre Point was five million.
In 1966 when it was finished it was worth eleven million.
Now after carefully keeping it empty for three years its value is more like nineteen million. Profit:
Fourteen million pounds.
When historians look back at these last ten years it won't be the Harold Wilsons they'll be writing about but the Harry Hyams. These super secret businessmen with their yachts and planes nd fear of publicity are the men who characterise our age. When all the lonely perverts and sopp Im stars that fill the pages of the unfree press have been forgotten these are the men who will l remembered. The present is in their hands and unless we do something about it so is the future. Nine million people live in slums. Nearly two out of every ten households live below the poverty level. Ten thousand families are homeless. Cathy come to Centre Point ...... IT'S EMPTY.
PETER LOVE Odham Estate's Property 1959 1960 1961 • • 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 £22,328 £152,163 £6,482,579 £7,571,645 £11,829,602 £23,364,503 £31,597,748 £ 38,978,403 £46,201,053
The Black Dwarf 28th Feb 1969