In a grubby brick building on Hackney’s Murder Mile, Ben Way is inconspicuous among the hordes of teenagers. Fresh faced and dressed in a fashionable t-shirt, his appearance masks the fact that he is actually in his twenties – and a multimillionaire.
When he was 17, Way made £25m from a business he started in his bedroom. But because he remembered how it felt to be told he would never make anything of himself and not to have enough cash in his pocket for a tube ticket, Way was determined to spend at least some of his money helping other young people.
Now 28, Way swapped Mayfair for Murder Mile three years ago in the first ever episode of Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire. For 10 days, the internet entrepreneur lived undercover in a shared flat on a Hackney estate, earned his keep in a breaker’s yard and volunteered at the Pedro Club on Rushmore Road. In one of the most violent areas of London, he was taught how to defuse fights by club manager Ufu Niazi, and learned how to command teenagers’ respect from champion boxer turned outreach worker James Cook.
When Way slipped back into his suit and revealed his true identity, he signed three cheques: £20,000 for Niazi to invest in the Pedro Club, £10,000 to launch the career of a young fashion designer called Wayne and £10,000 for Cook to have a white wedding. But what effect did the money have on life in this corner of Clapton once the cameras stopped rolling?
Inside the Pedro Club, the new recording studio built with Way’s donation is sitting empty. “It was what I wanted to do with the money and what Ben wanted to do with the money, and the idea was to provide a rentable facility to help the club sustain itself,” says Niazi. However, broken equipment means the studio has had to be taken out of action until the centre can afford to repair it.
“We are still paying bills with no money coming in,” Cook admits. “Some of the young people who come through the doors don’t care if they live to see next week, and the police want us to open seven days a week because we are keeping kids off the streets and out of trouble. We may have to close for a few months to sort out funding. It’s really hard, but we won’t consider failing.”
Last year Way once again stepped in to save the failing club, launching 1000Bricks.com in a bid to raise £100,000. The website sells advertising space on bricks in the club’s wall. “It didn’t take off,” he sighs. “We put a lot of money and effort into getting it up and running, but we struggled to get media support. It’s a great shame.”
The fledgling fashion business that Way invested in during The Secret Millionaire also failed to take flight. After the show, teenage designer Wayne went from selling his clothes on the street to seeing them on the rails in high street shops, but he has since dropped out of the fashion business.
“We ended up giving a lot more investment and a lot more help to Wayne after the show,” says Way. “It was probably a bit too much for him, and he’s gone on to do some other design projects now. Wayne was the biggest financial risk that I took, but what I hope is that it’s given him a taster of what’s possible and that he might return to fashion in the future.”
But one lasting legacy of the show was James Cook’s wedding to his patient fiancée, who had been waiting to tie the knot for 19 years. “I can’t go anywhere now without people congratulating me on finally getting married,” Cook laughs. Way funded the white wedding to acknowledge Cook’s hard work in Hackney. “It was an amazing wedding and a beautiful day, although quite hard giving my best man speech after only having known James for eight weeks,” says Way. It wasn’t the only recognition Cook received for his efforts: in 2007 he was awarded an MBE for his work at the Pedro Club.
While the problems of the Murder Mile are not easily solved, the secret millionaire still believes that he did his bit to help with the money he donated. “It was what it was, and you can’t have any regrets in life. I went into this knowing that as long as I was true to myself, I would be fine. I just wanted to help. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t still be involved now.”
For the people behind the Pedro Club, Way’s intervention was about more than the sum on the cheque. “The programme did make a difference, but not for the reasons we perhaps expected it to,” says Niazi. “It highlighted the hard work that goes on in every community, up and down the country, and gave normal people a bit of recognition.
“I live on the Murder Mile, and slowly but surely, the violence here is diminishing. It’s a testament to the hard work that’s happened in Hackney, but that work was happening long before The Secret Millionaire arrived. Ben’s help has just made things a little bit easier.”
