Bull Sand Fort: Humber defence to be sold to highest bidder
An armour-plated World War One fort in the Humber Estuary, which can only be reached by boat or helicopter, is to be sold off to the highest bidder.
Bull Sand Fort, built between 1915 and 1919, sits in the sea three miles (4.8km) from Grimsby. Bidding for the building, described as "needing refurbishment", would start at £50,000, agents Savills said.
This is the catch 22 of the property market right now, all the decent jobs are on land, but all the affordable property is in the middle of the North Sea.
>>452521 Sealand could do that because their fort was illegally built in international waters. Bull Sand is far too close to the shore. Looks like you can actually walk to it in low tides so you wouldn't even be safe from the ravening hordes of Hull.
I wonder if you could let Sealand annexe you, or if that would cause issues.
>>452519 You'll be about 600 metres from where the Hull to Rotterdam ferry goes past, provided P&O are still in business.
Beyond that you're probably a couple of miles away from the lifeboat station at Spurn Point and around the same in the other direction from Cleethorpes.
>>452520 There's sea forts in the Solent they've converted to hotels. Besides, if you're in the middle of the Humber who's gonna know and what can they actually do about it?
>>452522 Bull Sand is the one in the background. Haile Sand is the one close to the shoreline.
While it's not much more squalid than my teenage bedroom, I've got no desire to go back to living that way. I've also got no money, but you didn't know that when you started reading this.
My mother's very much a sticks-in-vases type, I'm amazed she's never had a live laugh love on the wall. I seem to remember a 'wine o'clock' sign at some point.
So with a skiff you could get back to shore and buy supplies, maybe a small diesel stove and a some insulation on one of the rooms and you could keep it dry. With a decent pringles antenna you might even get 3g, so what's not to love?
I can't find the internal square footage anywhere but with hydroponics you can harvest about one lettuce a day from a 1'x5'x5' hydroponic setup. That's maybe 2% of your daily calorie needs but I'm sure there's enough room there to scale it up and diversify, at least for one person.
I imagine a tidal generator would cover all your power needs though you'd be spending tens of thousands initially for the grow lights. You'd be relatively self-sufficient in terms of hydroponic nutrients with a few vermicomposting setups, they'd take up possibly one room at most.
For fresh water your options are an electric still of some sort (I think that would use too much of the generator's capacity but haven't done the maths), rainwater collection (this is going to be slightly salty no matter what), or solar stills, which need a very large area of direct sun to work well and provide for both a person and the hydroponics, but I think this is the best bet as you could just make lots of them on floating rafts.
50K quid as a starting bid seems reasonable, but there's a chance it will fetch something in the region of 150K to 200K, as one of the neighbouring forts sold for £117,000 in 2018.
Anybody buying it will have to spend an absolute fortune renovating it though. From the looks of it, in order to make it look like a place that's in good nick and not a crumbling shithole, I'd expect an additional investment northwards of £500K. With the flexibility of spending double that, if the structure is in worse shape than meets the eye. And you'd still be bound by restrictions because it's a listed site.
Its use as a commercial property would also be limited to recoup your investment. You can't really run it as a hotel or restaurant, as being in the middle of a tidal zone makes accessing it a bit tricky. There are other places like that, for example Mont St. Michel in Normandy, but it has a road connecting it to the mainland at all times. And, well, you've got a mediaeval monastery there. A WWI poured-concrete military structure doesn't quite have the same appeal.
You could run it as a WWI museum, but interest will probably be limited, and you're again stuck with the problem of getting people to and from the site.
It'll probably end up becoming some shrewd millionaire getaway, where whoever will own it can feel a bit like a pound-shop Bond villain.
>>452552 You've got to tell them "Go through that door or I'll stake you through the heart" outside someone else's house, that way you're not inviting them in but there's a very simple binary choice.