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It’s hell living in a mansion

Here’s a property offer you’re not likely to see advertised in an estate agent’s window: sixteen-bedroom mansion, free to complete stranger. Must be wealthy, male and good DNA match to current owner.

The ancestral owner of the mansion, Sir Benjamin Slade says people living in a council house don’t know what hell it is living in a mansion. After he has given away his stately pile he wants to move into a council house. "I want to go to one of those rather large council houses, I've always fancied one," he said. "If anything goes wrong people just come around and fix it and the shops are nearby."

Sir Benjamin, who also has a multi-million pound business empire and a house in Chelsea, clearly has not quite got hold of the way council house allocation works - not just yet anyway.

The eccentric heir-less aristocrat is not saying too much about why he thinks living in his 13^th Century North Somerset mansion is "hell" for fear of putting off any rich distant relative, but he does mention mice under the floorboards, a staff of five and insurance costs alone of £1000 per month. Oh - and by the way, there is a requirement to host some 26 weddings next year, along with corporate conferences, murder mystery weekends and fashion shoots. There is also a herd of 430 cattle to be cared for.

Sir Benjamin has given a DNA sample to a team of genealogists, who will search for the closest match among Americans called Slade. Some 5,000 are estimated to live in North Carolina, where members of the Slade family are known to have emigrated in preceding centuries, possibly founding the town of Sladesville.

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