London’s billionaire Bishop Avenue mansions are rotting

 Bishop Avenue in North London is a prestigious address often called “Billionaires Row” due to the street’s soaring housing prices. But many of the sprawling mansions of Bishops Avenue have sat abandoned for a quarter of a century, collecting moss and slowing rotting.

For instance, the interior of the Tower, a £30 million mansion on the avenue, is full of pigeon skeletons, standing water and shattered glass. And it is just one of at least 16 palatial homes on the street that have fallen into serious disrepair.

Several of the properties, many of which are valued above £50 million, were purchased between 1989 and 1993 by the Saudi Arabian royal family when Saddam Hussein was still a threat, according to the Guardian.

“It’s not a neighborly place where you can chat over the fence,” Magdy Adib Ishak-Hannah, an Egyptian-born healthcare mogul, told the Guardian. “To be honest I have never seen what my neighbors look like. Next door a Saudi princess spent £35m a new house and I’ve never seen her. There are about three houses that are lived in 24/7 and half of the properties are occupied three to six months a year. The other half, who knows if they come or not?” [The Guardian] –Christopher Cameron