The art-loving tech bro turning a Napoleonic fort into a blockchain bunker

The port town of Dover is certainly not the most chi-chi place on the Kent Coast. While nearby Margate, Ramsgate and Folkestone have been transformed by fast trains, Arts Council England cash and the steady outflow of ex-Londoners looking to start families, cafes and record shops, Dover appears totally unaffected by gentrification.

This is a town that ranks among the poorest in the South East, where 35% of children live in poverty and rough sleeping is a common sight in the shuttered-up shop fronts of the high street. Although the area sees massive freight and tourism traffic, few stop to see Dover itself. Alongside the economic issues, its famous white cliffs and rocky shores have become a visual cue for immigration tensions, with Farage, Braverman, Patel et al staging easy photo opps here. Extreme far-right groups like Patriotic Alternative are also fond of a weekend in Dover, marching down the seafront with “stop the boats” banners and customised England flags.

But where some see disaster and division, others see opportunity. “I see Dover as a sleeping giant. It’s got so much potential,” beams 33-year-old entrepreneur David De Min from his office high above the town. “This is the entrance to the biggest passenger port in the world. At its peak, we had 13 million people coming through here a year. Even if we catch 0.5% of those people, that’s half a million; spending money and going to hotels and restaurants. Dover is, unfortunately, one of the most deprived seaside towns. But I see the most growth here. Margate has already hit that peak growth point, but Dover can only go up from here.”

But De Min’s masterplan is not a theme park, a hotel complex or an outpost of Tate. He is the driving force behind TechFort, a project described on its website as “the most advanced technology hub in Europe,” and a “thriving innovation ecosystem.” The TechFort is so-called because it occupies the site of one of England’s most ominous buildings – The Citadel – a Napoleonic fortress, turned WW2 troop garrison, turned Scum-era borstal, turned Cameron-era immigration detention centre. “This place used to be about protection, then about incarceration, now it’s about innovation,” boasts De Min, taking me on a whistlestop tour of The Citadel.

 

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Right now, The Citadel still looks very much like a prison – the kind of institution you’d associate with private security firms and opaque sentencing guidelines. There are stubby, barrack-style buildings with iron grates on the windows, huge grass moats lined with barbed wire and an imposing gate at the entrance. The old cell blocks look almost untouched, all institutional-green walls and anti-suicide netting. Apparently, Marvel has been filming Kraken the Hunter here for several months, with The Citadel doubling up as a Ukrainian super prison. On his social media profiles, De Min has posted videos of himself using the suicide nets as a makeshift trampoline – something he refrains from today.

De Min then takes me to his office, a prison outhouse of some kind, where the walls are plastered in motivational images and a multi-screen CCTV set up. I get a slightly closer look of the man himself: despite his relative youth, De Min seems to have had a few cosmetic procedures, and I wonder if he’s been practising some kind of jaw-shaping exercises. I ask him about his grand plans: “I bought The Citadel (from the Ministry of Justice) to build the world’s most impactful innovation centre, with a focus on sustainability,” he declares, without missing a beat. “Every six months or so, we will invite 50 entrepreneurs from around the world to help positively impact bits of our lives. We invite them to solve a challenge – so the next one is about smart cities, the one after that might be about deep-tech, or the ocean clean-up.” “Out of this we’ve already developed a number of new technologies,” he continues. “We’re building a gigafactory in Saudi Arabia using them.”

How all this works as a business, I’m not entirely sure. To me, The Citadel appears like a (very impressive) health & safety hazard, but I’ve dealt with enough tech-types to know that you can never really ask the key questions (“What is this?”, “Why are you doing it?”, “How does it make money?”) without getting some evasive spiel. Instead, I ask De Min about one idea that’s already up and running: the art gallery.

In a few hours, De Min will open the second exhibition at Citadel Fine Arts, a group show entitled ‘Olympians’. He isn’t the curator, or an “art person” at all, but is very much a believer in the Richard Florida “cluster theory” of creativity and capitalism. “If you put even just a couple of creators together, you see magic,” De Min tells me. “I think art brings people together, and there’s a nice symbiotic relationship between art and tech. We’ve got a little city here and we want to flood it with artists.”

But the tech centre and the gallery are just the beginning. “When I bought The Citadel, I saw it as a place of many different moving parts, where we would have a gallery space, food, exhibitions, and different tech communities. Then, we’d have wellness areas, hotels, eco pods. But I don’t want to force things, we’re growing very organically.”

The TechFort website mentions De Min’s plans for a “biohacking & longevity centre,” which intrigues me. Is he planning on creating some Silicon Valley blood boy centre, as some have suggested? “We’re going to have a whole range of offerings to help support entrepreneurs,” he says, playing it down somewhat. “Personally, I get into ice every morning, I go into a sauna, I go and run around the moats, I do different types of training. And that really helps promote mental wellbeing and a healthy lifestyle,” he says. “We want to be able to have facilities on site that support all the creatives, the entrepreneurs. And having the right sort of mindset starts with being able to look after your body. So this biohacking thing is something that is just going to help promote a healthy lifestyle.” Here it strikes me that De Min is trying to create something that sits between Centre Parcs, The Barbican, Equinox and the Googleplex.

At this point, De Min looks a little distracted ahead of the show, so I head back into the centre of Dover for lunch. The low sun is raging, and half the town appears to be shirtless – with more than a few missing limbs and open wounds on display. It couldn’t be further from De Min’s slick, calisthenic-honed tech-future. There is little to suggest much of an appetite for ‘innovation’ here, instead, just all the cliches of late-Tory Britain; Costas, Greggs, vape shops, Turkish barbers. I spot a few confused tourists, mostly Japanese and Germans, worriedly making their way back from the port, or down from the grand mediaeval castle that looms over the town.

 

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I find refuge in a Morrisons café, and begin to do some more diving into De Min’s background. He told me in our meeting that he is half-Dutch, and went to school in nearby Ramsgate and Canterbury. His father was a Shell Oil engineer, and his mother was “a florist for the Omani Royal Family.” In his twenties, he invented a video editing program called Velapp, which was apparently “backed” by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. De Min mentions Wozniak several times during our interview and on his LinkedIn, but the extent of their business relationship is unclear. However, a Kent Online piece from 2017 sheds some light on their dealings. “A young entrepreneur is aiming to emulate his idol after attracting the attention of the co-founder of Apple with his new app allowing users to edit video as they shoot,” reads the article in that inimitable local news style. “Mr Wozniak had been booked as the headline speaker at the Business Rocks conference in Manchester last year,” it goes on. “Determined to meet one of his biggest idols, Mr de Min persuaded a Rolls Royce dealership in Mayfair to lend him a car to take Mr Wozniak from his hotel to the conference.” It then goes on to quote David himself: “I arrived with Steve and everyone was saying, ‘Who’s this guy rocking up with Steve Wozniak?’ It was a joke among the Business Rocks staff that everyone was asking who I was. When he realised how simple it was he said ‘Wow!’ I have a voice clip of him saying it and I could listen to it on repeat. He is such a humble lovely guy. I really admire him because he took the time to speak with me.”

Reading this, it seems much more likely that a young De Min essentially doorstepped Wozniak at a conference, rather than securing any real backing from him. But the piece does mention a £25,000 interest-free loan De Min received from Kent County Council, with an aim to develop Velapp. There is an interesting parallel here with TechFort, which received over a million pounds from the Government’s Getting Building Fund, with the help of then Dover MP Natalie Elphicke, (infamous for defending her sex offender ex-husband in The Sun.)

More interesting again is the role that De Min plays on social media. With his impish grin, swept-back hair and habit of filming go-pro videos around The Citadel, he resembles some kind of Richie Rich figure, a Crypto Lord Fauntleroy who’s fallen into possession of a giant adventure playground. Yet, he appears to share the obsessions of the Andrew Tate generation; financial growth, fitness, machismo, grooming routines, success, endlessly spouting tech-speak and posing next to his personalised plated Overfinch. In one video, he’s seen watching the Euros quarter-final, on his phone, while lying on the anti-suicide netting. How he and a town like Dover came onto this collision course is fascinating, and perhaps speaks to our culture’s rampant obsession with entrepreneurialism.

After kicking my heels for an hour or so, it’s time to head to The Citadel for the big show opening. As I arrive at the entrance to the art space, a teenage girl in full Grecian regalia – (the Olympians theme, I suppose) hands me my solitary drinks token. There’s also a stall selling sliders, some fancy toilets, a DJ playing ambient house and the strange vision of De Min himself, now pacing around in a monogrammed ‘DDM’ red leather jacket and Comme des Garçons Converse. He’s filming content, of course, trying to create a steadicam effect by spinning his phone around.

I go to check out the art which, as I expected,  is more “art in the community” than Gagosian. The Olympian theme is hard to find here. Instead, it seems to be a ragtag collection of local artists – mostly from Folkestone and a few from London. There are photorealistic portraits, mixed media paintings, prog-rock style fantasy scenes in acrylic, and a Marc Quinn-esque cast of a man’s head, filled with litter including Pepsi labels and bottle tops. There is also a room dedicated to a painter who specialises in approximations of other artists’ work; Basquiat, Banksy, Warhol and Lichtenstein. It’s an impressive space, made even more so by the bright blue English channel beyond the windows, but the art seems very much like the kind you may find in a local cafe, or for sale in a seaside gallery. The prices, however, are not. One charcoal portrait is going for £4k and one of the prog scenes for nearly £3k.

I go to speak to De Min and his curator Helena Safari, but they seem too preoccupied with the great and the good of the Kent Coast, including both Folkestone and Dover’s mayors. The punters sip their prosecco and politely inspect the art. I head home, safe in the knowledge that the most fascinating part of the TechFort project is David De Min himself.

On the train home, I pass through nearby Folkestone where I spot an enormous street-art style installation reading “Folkestone is an Art School”, apparently created by the artist Bob and Roberta Smith. Perhaps, one day, there will be one reading “Dover is the most advanced technology hub in Europe,” but right now, it feels unlikely.