Why has an entrepreneur spent 25,000 on a disused staircase?

As the gavel bangs down at a property auction in central London, one man stands up and throws his son in the air while shouting “we got it!”

It is perhaps not the usual reaction for those accustomed to such auctions, but this man, Simon Squibb, has bought a rather unusual lot.

The 49-year-old businessman is now the proud owner of a four-storey staircase in south-west London – an item he bought for £25,000.

The disused stairwell, located behind a Starbucks on a main road in Twickenham, originally had a guide price of £20,000.

The staircase is no longer connected to the block of flats it used to serve following a redevelopment in 2016. It is also currently littered with bicycles, cardboard boxes and other discarded items.

But that hasn’t put Mr Squibb off.

Speaking after the auction, the businessman says the idea for buying the stairwell had only been “formed in the last 48 hours” and his team “haven’t seen the building in person, don’t know the legal implications and don’t know if we can get the planning permission we need for it”.

Despite this, the dad-of-one, who lives in north London, believes it is “worth taking a risk” and he had been “so determined to win it I would have kept on bidding”.

Mr Squibb is the chief executive of Helpbnk, a 75,000 person online community that rewards people for helping others and “allows entrepreneurs to get the help they need for free”.

He was inspired to set up the company after he was made homeless when he was aged 15 and didn’t have a support network to help him. He has since created several businesses and invested in many start-ups.

Mr Squibb says his mission now “is to help other people’s dreams come true” and it therefore seemed “symbolic to buy the only staircase for sale”.

“I want to turn this staircase into something that represents that anything is possible,” he explains.

“My vision is for each of the floors to have a different pop-up business – it might have a designer showcasing their new line of clothes on one floor, a coffee shop on another and a new restaurant at the top that is serving food for people to try.”

Mr Squibb’s blasé nature may seem odd given his large financial investment in something which may not turn out to be what he wants, but he tells me that “a lot of big businesses started in a garage, and so we’re starting in a stairwell”.

He adds that if it cannot be the pop-up venue he dreams of, he will use the stairwell as “a hangout place for entrepreneurs.

“What is important is that we are a part of the step-by-step journey of making dreams come true”.

At the sale the auctioneer Chris Glenn had told prospective buyers he had “never sold a vacant stairwell in 30 years doing the job”, but described it as being an “interesting and unusual property” which had the “potential for great ideas”.

It’s something which Jack Whettingsteel, co-founder of Helpbnk, seems to buy into.

“You can’t put a price on opportunity and I think we would have bid much higher for the stairwell,” he says.

When asked about the practicalities of transforming the building, he explains that “it may not seem like the best investment, but we’ll turn it into the best one”.

“I am sure we will make it work whatever,” he says.

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