MR HYAMS AND HIS EMPTY SKYSCRAPER

Workers Press no. 782, 3 June 1972 · scan page 5

Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.

Right in the centre of London stands a monument to property speculators and financiers all over the world.

almost any part of London's West End you can see the giant Post Office tower, looking like Britain's answer to the space race. You can invariably see Centre Point as well.

Standing at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street is this 32-storey office block, empty now for seven years.

It is unoccupied because its owner, a certain Mr Harry John Hyams cannot find anyone willing to pay the rent he is demanding, which is put at Elim a year.

Hyams is regarded as one of the more enigmatic figures on the property scene. He has unenviable reputation owning more empty buildings in London than anyone else.

Yet the career of this man, said to be worth about £30m in personal wealth, Oldham Estate Company, is no more than a record of the vast fortunes made by post-war property speculators.

1945 Hyams was 17 and he went to work for Joe Levy's estate agency. Levy ondent 1959 Hyams began the which were to make him a multi-millionaire.

All his accumulated skill in property development was now brought to bear on an unknown company in Lancashire, the Oldham Estate Company.

The company was a "shell', a device used by property men in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the Stock Exchange clamped down on it.

A public company was needed to overcome the surtax hazards in a private company, and it was cheaper to buy an existing company with a quotation on the stock market.

A 'shell' was essentially a company whose old business had been sold or was on the point of fading out. The advantages in buying one was the ability to insert private assets into it without giving nearly so much information to the investing public as was required on a conventional floatation.

Hyams first heard of Oldham in January 1959. Within a fortnight he was in the small northern town looking at the Victorian cottages and cotton mills. which stood in the company's balance sheet £26,611. BORROWED were told to let at £20,000 and it remained unoccupied for three years.

It finally went for £18,500 a offer compensation on pre-war values, they couldn't persuade the owners to sell. And it was already October 1958. Above: one of the few photoraphs of Harry Hyams, here vith his wife. period of 150 years. It was