A Middle Eastern royal has spent £21 million on a garage in one of London’s most expensive districts
A Middle Eastern royal has come up with a clever way of dealing with London's notoriously difficult parking system, spending £21 million to buy an entire parking garage.
According to a report in The Times, the unnamed Gulf royal bought the parking garage in the Knightsbridge district of the capital to store their collection of roughly 80 cars, which includes both modern supercars and classics.
Knightsbridge in central London is home to some of the capital's most expensive properties, including the One Hyde Park development, where one bedroom flats can cost as much as £2.6 million.
The area is a favoured haunt of wealthy Middle Eastern citizens in London, and in the summer it is common to see fleets of elaborately painted supercars with Arabic number plates driving its streets.
The garage is situated close to Harrods, the department store often associated with lavish and unnecessary spending. It is housed in a former NCP car park that has already been converted to suit the needs of the wealthy automobile owner.
(Source: Google maps)
"A car park in central London is being sold for more than entire streets and villages outside the capital’s centre and yet even upper-middle class generations are finding it impossible to rent in London, let alone purchase in their lifetime," a spokesman for Waterbridge Estates, which carried out the save, said.
"The value of his collection is significantly higher than the price he has paid for the parking."
Parking in prime central London is notoriously expensive and difficult, with individual spaces often selling for as much as £350,000. In February 2016 a single parking garage in a back alley in Chelsea sold for £360,000, roughly £2,500 per square foot.
This article originally appeared on Business Insider