The reason why I will never be rich …

So I’m sitting in a restaurant at a hotel in Barbados, I’m the guest of the hotel owner who is present at the table of ten or twelve people and opposite me is a young man in his late twenties, well spoken, obviously the product of a public school somewhere and at some point in the evening he is introduced to me as a property developer who lives in Harrogate, my suspicion of a public schoolboy is confirmed, he does have a lovely wife seated beside him though although I note that he interupts everything she starts to say in an attempt to keep her quiet.

He asks where I’m from and I tell him Leeds, he asks why I am here (the subtext being “what qualifies you to sit at the owners table”) and I tell him why and he only gets interested when I tell him that I own the company and that we’ve been trading for three generations, for some strange reason that always impresses the toffs.

And then he tells me that he is getting into developing warehouse apartments, former Victorian industrial buildings that he can divide up into shoebox size living quarters and flog off to toffs like himself for an outrageous amount of money, its 1995 and there has already been one such successful development in Leeds along the riverbank, he wasn’t involved but he’s just bought the empty five storey factory/warehouse premises of a customer of mine, Centaur Clothing.

We chat about Centaur for a while, I was very familiar with the building layout and the high quality tailoring production line that was based there, it closed the previous year due to cheap Taiwanese imports and its the way that the whole textile industry is heading and for Leeds that could be a disaster as a huge chunk of the city’s wealth was created on the back of textiles and clothing manufacture – by 1998 nearly all of this would be gone.

He tells me that if his Centaur project is a success then he’ll be looking for other similar sites in the city and if I get to hear of any clients of mine who are struggling would I let him know so that he can be first ont he doorstep when the liquidators call ?

The Centaur building is a magnificent Victorian pile which was specifically built as a clothing factory, its top floor will make some spectacular penthouse apartments as the roof was completely glazed, it was the cutting room int he factory and the highly skilled cloth cutters cut each suit length by hand and required plenty of light in which to do so, I explain all this to him together with a few other features of the building but he doesn’t seem interested, they’re putting a “proper” roof on the top floor as no-one wants a glazed one apparently and it sounds like he’s going to butcher the building.

So then I ask him if he is sure that he’s picked the prime location for his toffs apartments and he replies robustly in the affirmative, its only two minutes walk from the magnificent Leeds Town Hall and just around the corner from the County and Crown Courts, clearly he expects his residents to be well-heeled.

I remind him that the previous warehouse conversion in the city was on the waterfront and you can sort of understand how people would be tempted by that sort of lifestyle, but of course the Centaur building is not on the waterfront at all, in fact one of its walls is also the wall to the very, very busy four lane Leeds Inner Ring Road and the residents on that side of the building will find no respite from 24 hours traffic noise.

Arguably the residents on the other side of the building will have an even worse deal for their view out of their windows is of the St Georges Crypt, the one place in Leeds where all the homeless people are guaranteed a bed and a hot meal for the night – mornings and evenings are not the ideal time to be spent hanging around outside the Crypt and the view out of your hi-tech apartment window is not going to lend itself to your new lifestyle, unless you favour the view of complete contrast of course, a sort of “look what I’ve got, you bums” sort of experience.

He listens to all of this and stays quiet for some time afterwards, it was obviously not what he was expecting to hear and after the meal he and his lovely looking (though completely dumb) wife drift away and I never see them again.

Twelve months later his development is finished and sold completely off plan and he goes on to purchase another warehouse further down the river, and on, and on.

I think I’m starting to understand now why it is that I am penniless and he is probably a zillionairre by now.