The group said it aimed to highlight growing homelessness in Britain
By Matthew Ponsford
LONDON, Feb 1 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Squatters who occupied a $15 million central London mansion left empty by its foreign owner were forced to leave the property after bailiffs enforced a court order on Wednesday.
A group calling themselves the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians had been living in the building in Belgravia, one of the capital's most expensive neighbourhoods since Jan 23.
The group said it aimed to highlight growing homelessness in Britain at time when thousands of properties in London - many foreign owned - remain unused and empty.
Government figures released last month showed more than 200,000 homes in England have been empty for more than six months.
Tom Fox, a member of the activist group, said they left on Wednesday morning when police and bailiffs arrived with a writ of possession issued after a judge ruled that occupants had trespassed.
The group said in a statement they had entered the empty building through an open window and converted the former school into a shelter for more than 25 people.
Fox said the group had already found a new building to move to in nearby Grosvenor Gardens where they plan to continue to offer shelter for the homeless and activity programs.
The 23-year-old said organised volunteer programmers could transform vacant homes into temporary shelter.
"The ideal scenario would be that it would become legislation that if you owned a building that had stayed vacant for so long, you would open the doors to the homeless," said Fox.
The property is a former Spanish school in a leafy London square, named in December by Lloyds Bank research as London's most expensive address.
The average home in Eaton Square costs nearly 17 million pounds ($21.5 million), according to analysis of recorded land registry prices.
The group hopes to continue to draw attention to the huge number of empty buildings that are unused despite thousands of Londoners being homeless, Fox said.
The number of people sleeping rough in England rose for the sixth year in a row, according to the latest official figures released Wednesday.
Latest official figures show an estimated 4,134 people slept outside in 2016, up 16 percent on the previous year
The Guardian newspaper reported the judge had granted "possession forthwith" of the Belgravia mansion to MCA Shipping Ltd, a Gibraltar-based company representing Russian banking billionaire Andrey Goncharenko.
($1 = 0.7893 pounds)
(Reporting by Matthew Ponsford, Editing by Paola Totaro and Astrid Zweynert.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)
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