Hull’s Empty Four-Star Hotel Became a £1m Cannabis Factory

A police constable put the cannabis inside Hull’s empty Portland Hotel at more than £1 million on the street. Officers walked into the former four-star on Paragon Street shortly after 10am on 6 September 2023 and several people ran.

Ngoc Nguyen, 22, and Hai Hoang, 31, both from Vietnam and living in the building, were later each jailed for two and a half years for conspiracy to produce cannabis. A third suspect got away. The hotel, Hull’s first AA four-star, had not taken a paying guest since 2012. The grow was one use of a shell that planning papers later tried to fill with 122 bedsits, on a street Humberside Police already treated as high crime.

Police Spent Two Days Inside the Old Portland

The warrant came from a public tip-off. Humberside Police’s Hull Facebook account called it “a massive cannabis factory” in the town centre and thanked the person who rang it in. By Friday 8 September 2023, more than 48 hours after the door went in, forensic staff in white suits were still walking the main hallway and at least three vans sat outside.

A passer-by on Paragon Street heard metal clanking, as if fittings were being ripped out. The hotel had looked empty for years. Something was running inside it anyway.

THE RAID IN NUMBERS

• The time: Officers went in shortly after 10am on Wednesday 6 September 2023.
• The value: A police constable told Hull Crown Court the potential haul was more than £1 million on the street.
• The arrests: Hoang was found in a toilet; Nguyen was stopped nearby on Albion Street.
• The gap: Several people fled when police announced themselves, and a third suspect was not caught.

A force spokesperson said Nguyen, then 21, and a man charged as Phan Hoang, then 30, both of no fixed abode, were accused of conspiracy to produce cannabis and remanded to Hull Magistrates’ Court. At trial the second man was Hai Hoang, 31. Officers said they had found cannabis plants throughout the property. They did not publish a plant count.

When officers entered, they made themselves known and several people made off, making good their escape.

Michele Stuart-Lofthouse, prosecuting, Hull Crown Court

Indoor crops of this size sit inside a global trade. The World Health Organization still lists cannabis as the world’s most widely cultivated illicit drug, and half of all drug seizures worldwide are cannabis seizures. Hull’s empty hotel was a local floor of that market, wired through a building that already had rooms, power, and cover from the street.

They Said They Were Only Washing Trays

Both men denied the conspiracy. A jury convicted them anyway. They had been living in the former hotel. Their account, put to the court through the prosecutor and their barristers, was that they cooked, washed, and cleaned, and that the plants were someone else’s.

Nguyen told officers he had been in Britain about two years and liked the country. He said he was homeless when a man offered food and a bed and asked for nothing back. About a month before the raid, he said, he travelled to Paragon Street in the boot of that man’s car.

WHAT NGUYEN TOLD DETECTIVES

• The other men: Other Vietnamese males lived in the building; he said he never spoke to them and could not describe them.
• The threat: He said he would be beaten if he left, was not paid, and had been offered money.
• The work: He denied knowing about the cannabis, said he only cooked, and claimed he could not smell anything.
• The phone: Someone who visited gave him a phone two weeks earlier; he said he used it for games and friends.
• The plants: He photographed them, never called for help, carried loads to the third floor, and touched some of the crop. He ran, he said, because everyone else was running.

Hoang said he had come to Britain willingly. He could not remember how many times he had been at the old hotel. The phone taken from him was his. Cathy Kioko-Gilligan, his barrister, said he went there thinking he would get construction work, then found a cannabis factory and wanted no part of it. He had family in Vietnam. Steven Garth represented Nguyen. Both men, the defence said, were given food, beer, and cigarettes in the building.

That story is now a stock scene in British indoor grows: men found on the floor, often Vietnamese, saying they were cleaners or debt labour, while the people who rented the shell and sold the dried weight are not in the dock. Two years before the Portland raid, Judge Bury at the same court jailed Duong Nguyen, 22, and Long Phung, 33, for three years each over 1,200 plants in the former Zetland Arms pub. He rejected their kidnap account and still said the root cause was exploitation.

Cross-border cultivation crews are the sort of group states built the UN treaty on transnational organised crime to cover. In Hull, the charge sheet stopped at conspiracy to produce cannabis. Nobody was named as the organiser. The man who, on Nguyen’s account, drove him across the city in a car boot was not in the room when the sentences were read.

Hull’s First Four-Star Hotel Had 100 Rooms

The Portland opened in the late 1960s as The Centre Hotel. It was Hull’s first AA four-star, a point of civic boast on the walk from Paragon station. In its busy years it had over 100 rooms, a large restaurant and dining suite, conference space, and a ground-floor bar.

Guests used those floors as bedrooms, kitchens, and meeting rooms. A grow needs the same things: closed rooms, power, water, and a way to move people and kit without drawing a crowd on the pavement. An empty hotel already has the plan.

The venue shut as a hotel in 2012. Eleven years later the same corridors held plants a constable valued at more than £1 million. Hidden indoor crops of that kind are run with lights, fans, and ducting, the basic kit set out in public guides to how indoor cannabis crops are grown. The Portland was not a garden shed. It was a city-centre tower of ready-made rooms.

Local journalist James Hoggarth kept photographing the shell after it closed. In January 2023 he posted pictures of barriers the council had asked for on public safety grounds. In May 2024, months after the raid, he noted a light still on in one room and notices taped in the windows. From the street the building looked dead. It was never quite empty.

Student Housing, Then an Auction Sale

Planning papers filed with the later HMO bid set out the years between the last guest and the warrant. In 2013 the hotel was converted to student housing. The operator hit money trouble. In 2018 the property was sold at auction.

Those papers also record allegations of a fraudulent investment scheme after the change of owner, and they record the Humberside Police raid that found a cannabis factory on the first floor. Knight Wood Portfolio Ltd, the applicant on the 2025 scheme, told the council it was the new owner and had no link to the earlier projects.

THE BUILDING AFTER THE GUESTS LEFT

The student conversion and the auction sit five years apart. The raid sits five years after the auction. Each chapter needed the same fact: a large building on Paragon Street with no working hotel business inside it. The two men who drew prison sentences arrived at the end of that chain, in the boot of a car and on a promise of building work.

The 122-Bed Plan Meets a Crime Objection

By June 2025 the vacant hotel was back in front of Hull City Council, this time as a giant house in multiple occupation. Knight Wood, with Avison Young, asked to turn it into 122 single-occupancy bedsits across six storeys, each room with its own kitchenette, and to refresh the exterior.

WHAT THE HMO PAPERS PROMISED

• Shared kit: Laundry on each floor, 13 working pods on the first floor, a gym, and a cinema room.
• Bikes: 122 cycle spaces, one per proposed bedsit.
• The ground floor: The old bar switched to commercial use, and the existing shop split into three units.
• The pitch: Rooms described as well designed housing for working people, not a continuation of the earlier schemes.

St Andrew’s and Docklands Labour councillors Leanne Fudge, Haroldo Herrera-Richmond, and Daren Hale called the bid in so planning committee, not officers, would decide it. Cllr Fudge wanted guarantees that an eyesore would not be swapped for a new problem. Hull Labour compared legal HMO bedroom sizes to a North Sea ferry cabin.

An officer report prepared for the 3 September 2025 committee recommended refusal. It accepted regeneration and housing benefits, then said the density, form, and location would potentially raise crime and fear of crime, because large single-occupancy HMOs correlate with disorder and because Humberside Police had confirmed high crime in the St Andrews and Docklands ward.

Avison Young asked for a delay to talk to the force, saying there was a misunderstanding about management and safety measures. Place Yorkshire recorded a new date of 1 October 2025. The public row by then was barely about cannabis. It was about 122 doors on a street that had already hosted a factory.

Campaign posts on 2 September 2026 and 18 September 2026 said a later 109-room version of the scheme had since been approved by six votes to five, after police objections were overcome, with no occupancy lock written into the permission. Those posts are not the council’s decision notice. They do show where the argument went: away from Nguyen and Hoang, toward who would sleep in the same shell next.

The Third Suspect Was Never Caught

The jury was asked to judge two men found on the day, one in a toilet, one on Albion Street. It did. The sentences were two and a half years each. The third person who ran off Paragon Street was not in the indictment the court read out.

Nguyen’s account, if the jury had accepted it in full, described a man who collected a homeless newcomer, hid him in a car boot, parked him in a dead hotel with other Vietnamese men, and told him he would be beaten if he left. That man was not sentenced in February 2024. Neither was whoever held the lease on a first-floor grow in a building with over 100 rooms.

The Portland’s problem did not start with two gardeners and it did not end when they went down the steps at Hull Crown Court. It started when a four-star hotel on Paragon Street closed in 2012 and stayed large, wired, and empty. The plants were one crop in that vacancy. The 122-bed papers are another. The person who got out of the door when police shouted is still, on the public record, unnamed.