The entrepreneur reworking a fort into Dragons’ Den-style tech hub

An entrepreneur plans to build Britain’s first Silicon Valley village from a 245-year-old Napoleonic fort and former prison which will boast a Dragons’ Den-style tech-hub, luxury hotel and a vertical indoor farm.

Businessman David De Min hopes to transform the 33-acre fortress Dover Citadel on the Kent Coast into a world-renowned tourist and business destination which will also feature its own whiskey distillery, wellness spa and music and arts venue.

He bought the site from the Ministry of Justice three years ago for £1.8 million but estimates the ambitious project may reach between £200million and half a billion pounds once finished so is currently working on securing funding from undisclosed Emirati Royals among other potential investors.

The oldest part of the fort – perched high on Dover’s famous White Cliffs overlooking the coast of France some 20-miles away across the Channel – was built in 1775 and became the first line of defence against Napoleon Bonaparte and his naval fleet.

It was later used as military barracks in the Crimean War and both World Wars but in 1956 the Citadel was handed over to HM Prison Service where it served as a Young Offenders Institution until 2002 when it became an Immigration Detention Centre before closing in 2015.

Dutch-born Mr De Min, 33, is the first individual to own the site since King George IV in 1808 after securing a £1million grant from the Government’s Getting Building Fund, which aims to boost jobs and infrastructure in areas where the economy was hit hardest by the pandemic.

The rest of the funding came from money his family made from buying and selling properties in Kent as well as investments from business contacts and friends.

Standing under the impressive gatehouse of the Citadel, which is reached by crossing a concrete bridge over a dried-up grassy moat, Mr De Min told MailOnline: ‘This place has stood for 245-years, first as a foreboding fortress protecting the country and later as a place of incarceration.

‘Teachers in Dover would point up to it and warn naughty children: ‘If you don’t behave you’ll end up in there’. My hope is that, going forward, teachers will start pointing up and saying: ‘If you’re good, you may be lucky enough to work there.’

‘I want to make it a place to inspire and innovate.’

The Citadel comprises 54 individual buildings with about 220,000 square feet of space above ground and around 30,000 square feet below it with a network of subterranean tunnels.

Located roughly in the middle of the site is a 1970s-built prison block, made up of more than 60 cells on three levels, once home to young offenders and then migrants who had entered the UK illegally.

It is currently used as a film set, most recently doubling up as a Ukrainian jail for upcoming Marvel movie Kraven the Hunter starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and in which Mr De Min appears fleetingly as a prisoner.

Renting out the former prison for film locations helps to generate cash short term but soon the cells will be knocked through and re-developed to create state-of-the-art office and workspaces for tech firms.

Gone too will be the anti-suicide netting which prevented prisoners from jumping, instead vines and other lush plants will tumble down from the 100-foot high ceiling to inspire creativity and health.

But perhaps the most ambitious plans are for the ground floor as Mr De Min revealed: ‘What we’re hoping to do is to install a stage complete with lighting and speakers for a Dragons’ Den-style TV show, where budding entrepreneurs will pitch ideas for innovations in business and technology.

‘In front of the stage will sit five potential investors, all well-known billionaire businessman. I’ve had the greenlight from Sky TV to start production.’

Mr De Min will not confirm who will be involved, although businessman and former Dragon Duncan Duncan Bannatyne is rumoured to be among those approached.

The prison will be renamed the TechFort and will be a ‘gathering of start-ups to pursue their ideas for sustainable technology.

His own construction tech firm – System De Min – will be headquartered there. He has developed a brick made from expanded clay and pearlite which has an interlocking design similar to Lego that does not require mortar.

The bricks also act as insulation but keep their structural integrity and are apparently four times stronger than a regular clay brick allowing homes to be built five-times faster than regular construction.

Mr De Min said he has potential investment from three Gulf States and added: ‘We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel but instead simplifying current building techniques and making them far more efficient. 

‘It will revolutionise the industry. This is the sort of technological advances I want to welcome and encourage at the Citadel.’

To the left of the old prison and beyond the imposing razor wire perimeter fencing is The Officer’s Mess, built in 1861 in the Gothic Revival style with original gun-ports and a bomb-proof, earth-filled roof.

It will form phase one of the Citadel project next June when planning permission will be submitted to turn the listed property into a luxury 80-100-room hotel and serviced apartments.

The dusty, dark bowels of the Victorian building are currently home to former punishment cells, which once held wayward soldiers and later disruptive prisoners, who dubbed it ‘The Hole’.

Foul-mouthed graffiti remains scrawled on the walls and the doors. Mr De Min plans to convert the 24 basement cells into a wine cellar and wine tasting experience as well as a potential cigar bar for the hotel.

The plans are being partly funded by police forces who rent the dilapidated Officer’s Mess to train armed counter-terror squads to clear out buildings.

Running around the Citadel is a mile-long dry moat, on which Mr De Min says one of the world’s leading events companies wants to build a concert venue with the ocean as a backdrop.

He said: ‘They approached us with the idea, we can’t give out too much information because we’re under an NDA but we could easily do big numbers on it.

‘The moat is on a gradient and so works perfectly as a venue with a stage built at the bottom – imagine lighting on either side of the moat, it would be amazing. You can see the French coast – where else do you have a view like this? It would be one of the most unique gig venues in the world.’

Hanging down from the entrance bridge above the moat is a swing. Another swing hangs over the anti-suicide netting back in the prison.

These, Mr De Min explained, were to help him train in keeping his balance before he was winched 130-ft down into the on-site well.

He said: ‘I was hoisted down to fetch a sample of water to see how pure it was. There’s a jar of the water in my office, it’s crystal clear, perfect, and means we have our own water source which fits in with our sustainability ethos.’

A vast network of tunnels and underground chambers run off the well and pumping station, some are still to be discovered having partially caved in over the years.

The pitch-black tunnels lead into some of the fort’s casemates, barrel-vaulted armoured structures from which guns and cannons were once positioned ready to fire.

Names and regimental numbers of soldiers stationed there in the 1930s are etched into the walls and rusting, crumbling doors dating back to the late 1700s remain just about standing.

In the future it’s hoped the subterranean chambers may be used as a distillery and bar for Citadel Whiskey.

The casemates, meanwhile, some of which were also used as barracks, will be turned into spaces for fashion and art – paintings by social media influencer Arron Crascall are currently on sale for £4000 – as well as room for vertical farms, which rather than traditional horizontal agriculture use vertical stacked layers to produce food.

Mr De Min is a champion of ‘biohacking’ in which people push their bodies to extremes via activities such as fasting and ice-baths to optimise physical and mental performance.

He plans to install a world-class wellness and longevity clinic and said: ‘We’d have hyperbaric oxygen chambers, laser infused IV drips, cryogenic chambers and ice baths.

‘I’d like the Citadel to have a wellness retreat – similar to what they have in Switzerland – whereby people could stay in the hotel and use the wellness clinic, in which we would customise meal plans based on someone’s blood type.’

Mr De Min left the Netherlands as a boy in 1995 when his engineer father, a Shell Oil engineer, took the family to Oman for work.

When the contract ended they moved to Canterbury, Kent, where Mr De Min went to state school St Stephen’s and later Kent College Canterbury, where he excelled at design technology.

He initially tried to purchase Snowdown Colliery near his hometown but was unable to buy the freehold so spent four years lobbying politicians and jumping through government hoops to buy the Citadel in 2021.

The grandiose project – which he estimates will take up to 25-years to complete – is being planned from his office at home, the fort and prison’s former healthcare centre, where he has seven mainly bunk-bed filled bedrooms, a sauna and make-shift gym.

Sitting in a black gaming chair surrounded by a bank of TV screens relaying images from countless CCTV cameras dotted around the site, he added: ‘I own the freehold to the Citadel but I feel as though I’m a custodian of one of the most unique sites in the world.

‘It may take ten or 25-years to complete this project but I’m someone who lives for the future, I live by my visions.

‘Dover is the entry point into the UK from the continent and I want to show Europe and the world that Britain is still thriving when it comes to technology.’

His plans have been given a mixed reaction by locals, however.

Fiona, a customer service assistant for travel agent TUI told the Sunday Times at the weekend: ‘Attracting luxury clientele is not going to affect any of us on the high street.’

Others welcome the prospect of bringing business to the area, where the child poverty rate is 35 per cent. 

Heather Horne, 64, who runs Stanley’s coffee bar and lounge argued: ‘The town is dying on its feet. Anything that brings something to Dover would be brilliant.’