How Alfie Best went from a caravan and leaving school at 12 to being one of Britain’s richest people with a £3.6m helicopter, £12k gold bath and 11 villas in Barbados
The self-made millionaire and 'proud gypsy' likes to spend his £285m fortune in style
A GARAGE full of Bugatti cars, a private £3.6m helicopter and holidays in one of the 11 villas he owns in Barbados are just some of the ways Alfie Best likes to spend his £285m fortune.
But life hasn't always been so luxurious for the 450th richest person in Britain. The Romany gypsy was born in a caravan by the roadside, left school at 12 to sell cars and earned £70 a week as a mobile phone salesman, while sleeping rough.
Yesterday's The Sunday Times Rich List revealed the 49-year-old self-made millionaire has added £35m to his bank account in the last 12 months alone.
Alfie is fast closing in on the Queen's £370m - and it turn outs his life is just as lavish.
Lavish multi-millionaire lifestyle
His core business, Wyldecrest Parks, has become the largest residential park operator in Europe with 450 employees, and he has grown his empire to include nightclubs, bars, golf clubs, gin, pies and upmarket holiday rentals.
Alfie's entrepreneurial success has seen him rake in millions and he now enjoys a luxury lifestyle to suit.
Lavish purchases include a £3.6m seven-seater helicopter and a £1.2m limited-edition six-wheel Mercedes G-Wagon pick-up truck.
Also in the driveway is a £2.7m Bugatti Chiron, £2m Bugatti Veyron and £350,000 Rolls-Royce Dawn.
Then comes the property.
Alfie has a £8m townhouse in North London's Hampstead, an £8.5m Surrey mansion and a 360-acre farm in Hertfordshire worth £12m. That's before the Mayfair flat is taken into account too.
He decks his homes out too - key items include a £110k sofa and £45k dining table and chairs and a £12k handmade copper gold bathtub imported from Indonesia.
He even spent £180k just on the kitchen of his Hampstead home, with the room alone the size of an average flat.
There is also a New York pad and 11 villas in Barbados which he rents out when he's not holidaying in them.
"Everything I own - whether it be a car or a house - is treated as an asset," says Alfie, who parties with celebrities including Lizzie Cundy.
But he still gets panic attacks when he makes extravagant purchases.
"When you know how hard it is to earn money, you still get that feeling of, 'Are you doing the right thing?'" he explained.
That didn't stop him buying the - now closed - entire chain of Rare Cow Steakhouse restaurants in 2014 after he enjoyed a meal there so much though.
Humble beginnings in caravan
But life hasn't always been this way for Alfie.
The future businessman was born in a caravan by the side of the road in Lutterworth, near Leicester.
"My family had driven there from east London the night before," he told the Times.
He spent the next 15 years living in the very same caravan with his "loving" parents and was in and out of school.
Alfie was bullied by classmates for being a gypsy but teased by other traveller kids for being in a uniform.
At 10 years old he began going door-to-door with his dad offering to tarmac people's driveways, and at 12 he left school to work.
The experience taught him a lot about being a good salesman.
"Why do gypsies talk so fast?" he has joked. "Well, how would you talk if somebody was slamming the door in your face! I had 30 seconds."
When he was 14 he began his own business buying and selling cars across the UK, and by 17 he had founded a van rental company.
"I thought I really could walk on water," he said of making enough cash to buy his own white Porsche 911 cabriolet and a £500k home.
Fall from grace
In the early 1990s, the recession left Alfie losing £1,000 a week and almost bankrupt at 20 years old.
He has since explained that he borrowed too much and couldn't keep up with the mortgage repayments - he owned £125,000 on a van site and borrowed £300k for his house.
At the same time, he was going through a stressful divorce from his first wife Rachel.
Struggling to make ends meet, he sold his Porsche and all his vans, and rented out his house.
He was forced to sleep in his Ford Escort van for three months, with all his credit cards blocked by his bank and unable to afford £15 to heat his office - an experience he has since described as "f****** painful".
Mobile madness
On the brink of accepting he was a "complete failure" and moving back into his parents' caravan, Alfie noticed that the mobile phone industry appeared unaffected by the recession after sitting outside a busy phone shop called Selectify.
He got a job as a salesman on £70 a week, but was soon selling more phones than anybody else.
He saved up enough commission money to buy his own shop, called Vodatek.
Within four years he had opened another 17 stores, before selling the firm in 2006.
That wasn't his only successful company though. In 2001, aged just 30 and encouraged by second wife Emily Jane Bruce, he decided to use his knowledge of growing up in caravans to buy a £1.7m mobile home park boasting 120 homes.
His extended family all sold up and moved into the new plot, which he called Wyldecrest Parks.
Family drama
In 2013, Alfie starred in TV show My Big Fat Gypsy Fortune - a Channel 4 documentary exploring the lives of wealthy travellers - with his son Alfie Best Jr.
The 21-year-old heir to the family fortune, who has gone on to star in ITV's Absolutely Ascot, has inherited his father's entrepreneurial spirit.
After selling sweets in school and flogging office supplies door-to-door, he started hosting parties for travellers, before buying a nightclub.
That's not to say family life has always been easy for Alfie Snr.
Alfie Jr almost died in a helicopter crash last year and in 2016, his son-in-law Matthew Newland attacked him with a machete in a Surrey car park.
Alfie had gone to police to complain of "ongoing domestic violence" towards his daughter, Elizabeth.
But, according to reports, he decided to "sort out ongoing tensions" by accepting his son-in-law's offer of a fight, and he was left injured during a brawl which saw Newland given a 13-month prison sentence.
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Despite now regularly referring to himself as a "proud gypsy", things have sometimes been hard for Alfie.
He previously explained: "We are the last acceptably racially abused race."
Last year he added to the Glasgow-based : “The best way to overcome racism is to avoid it.
"I didn’t tell anybody, apart from the gypsy community, that I was a gypsy up until I was in my 30s.”