Squatting on a fortune

[emad]

(Filed: 13/03/2005)

Eighteen years ago, Harry Hallowes built a lean-to shack on the edge of Hampstead Heath, and he has been there ever since. Here, Jeremy Clarke talks to the tramp who won't move for anything - not even £2 million

For an elderly man who has lived alone in a thicket for 18 years, Harry Hallowes' mental health appears robust. The 68-year-old tramp is no gibbering, smoke-blackened alcoholic but appears to lead the orderly, fastidious life of the average elderly bachelor - except that he lives in a shack.

Under a leafless elder bush, upturned mugs and saucepans are draining on a wooden board. Three pairs of stripy boxer shorts are soaking in a plastic bowl. Beside the cherry tree, on a makeshift washstand, is a neat line of toiletries: Right Guard Extra Dry, Big Hair Shampoo by Charles Worthington, and a fairly new toothbrush for his five remaining teeth. His wardrobe is a row of lidded medical waste bins, between which crocuses are sprouting.

He is an unusually truthful man with a pantheistic love of nature, spending his time communing with the trees, flowers and birds on the 30 square yards of thicket adjacent to Hampstead Heath, north London. His closest companion is a robin that he believes (mistakenly, in my opinion) to be the same robin he befriended when he first moved here almost two decades ago from Sligo.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/13/nhall13.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/03/13/ixhome.html

[carpediem]

1. I liked that story. It made me smile. I hope

they let him stay.