On one of our last days in London, Tim and I walked from Hyde Park towards Kensington, one of our favorite places in London. We’ve made the walk numerous times. Earlier I’d basically forced Tim to go into Harrods with me. He had zero interest in Harrods and felt completely out-of-place. In Tim’s mind, the only people who rightly belong in Harrods are people in the lowest tax bracket. I tried to explain to him that the people who work at Harrods likely couldn’t afford to shop there so he belonged as much as they did. In reality, Harrods isn’t that much different than Nordstroms, another store Tim doesn’t want to spend anytime at. He’s more of a TJ (or K) Maxx kind of fella. He might think that TK stands for us.

That visit to Harrods may have primed us for the excursion ahead. As we approached 2-8A Rutland Gate I turned to Tim and asked, “What in the world is all that?” Tim shrugged and walked in front of the gate. I, however, paused and walked behind the gates, straight up to the porch which was overrun with bunches of dried flowers, some in vases, some just strewn about.

I thought it was some sort of memorial to something or somebody and was curious enough to ask the only other person I saw poking around. “I am not sure,” she answered. “There seems to be a child’s theme to it, though.”

While there was indeed many stuffed animals shoved between the porch’s columns, there was so many random items filling the porch that I couldn’t narrow it down to a theme of any sort, much less one to children. The front door to the once palatial home was blocked by a makeshift dwelling of some sort. There were discarded ties and shoes and sports jackets and shopping bags and cardboard and pictures of all sorts hanging from the porch or wrought iron fencing. It is a graveyard for the discarded bits of people’s lives. The chaos of it is unsettling.

Tim continued to wait for me just beyond the entrance to the property. He’s respectful of other’s people’s property in a way that the journalist part of me isn’t. My friend Gordon used to tell me I was going to get shot one day walking up on people’s property the way I do. He told me that as I enticed him to walk up the gravel drive of someone we didn’t know because there was something I wanted to check out. We were in Tennessee at the time, not England, so he did have a point about guns and intruders. But what can I say? Curiosity is a writer’s catnip.

A car pulled up and a fella with a professional grade camera strapped about his neck approached the home. It was he who informed me that the chaotic scene before us was the work of a Swede named Anders Fernstedt. The unhoused Fernstedt has been rough living along Knightsbridge’s billionaire’s row for three years now. He reportedly picked the place because it was vacant and seemed peaceful, not because he was interested in drawing attention to the growing disparity between the obscenely wealthy and the grindingly poor.

It didn’t matter much to Fernstedt that Rutland Gate is reportedly one of the most expensive homes in the world. The 62,000 square foot mansion has 45 rooms, 24 gilded and jeweled bathrooms, an indoor pool, four lifts, and around 100 windows, many which look out on Hyde Park. Despite its opulence, the property has been in the hands of absentee and often neglectful owners. I guess when you are obscenely wealthy spending over £200m for a palatial place you don’t live in is to be expected.

The home has been through more owners than Trump has wives. From a Lebanese who was later assassinated to a Saudi royal to most recently Hui Ka Yan, a Chinese tycoon whose has been charged with bribery and fraud. The house went on the market again in 2022 but did not sell. So in a sense, you could say that Fernstedt is the home’s most consistent caretaker … of sorts. He has without question been its longest running house guest, although, he only inhabits the porch. The London Daily reported last week that the mansion has been approved for £276m in renovations. I’ve heard that it’s better to tear down a place and build from scratch rather than undergoing a renovation, as the budget for a renovation is likely to be higher than a rebuild. Looks like that’s the case here for sure.

All I know is that instead of walking to Kensington as we’d originally planned, we headed to Hyde Park instead, where we bought an ice cream cone and sat watching a heron strut it’s proud self at the fountain.

All that disparity between the haves and the have nots had left me completely discombobulated. And when I discovered later that Fernstedt has been banned from Hyde Park because of complaints that he was becoming too affectionate with the local swans, I just felt heartsick.

I return time and time again to something my friend Hugh Hollowell told me years ago: The difference between you and a homeless person is in your cell phone. You have people you can call if you need help. The homeless person doesn’t.

Despite what Trump and MAGA would have you believe, the only reason a wealth gap exists has nothing to do with the willingness of people to work and has everything to do with government policies that seek to serve the wealthiest among us by punishing the workers surrounding us.

I keep thinking about what one of Fernstedt’s posh neighbors said about him: “I believe in protecting people. I want to help the guy out. He just needs support.“

Exactly. Somebody alert Congress.