Gallery
Former pub up for grabs for £350,000
Hilary Cox, nee Thompson, in front of the building in 2005. This was the year Mrs Thompson opened it as the Cottage pub, decorated with some of her partner's family history items including their links to the fishing industry and lifeboats. Picture: Archant Library - Credit: Archant © 2004
An historic former cottage hospital with planning permission for conversion to eight apartments is going under the hammer.
The Grade II-listed building at 8 Louden Road, Cromer, will be auctioned in Norwich on Wednesday, February 12, with a guide price of £350,000, plus fees.
The listing on the Auction House East Anglia website reads: "This prominent building is located close to the centre of the town with attractive views over Cromer including the sea and church.
"It is only a few minutes' walk to the beach and sea front.
"It was formerly the town's hospital. Over the years the building has had a variety of uses, including a Conservative Club and most recently a social club and public house."
According to Mary Northway, a former chairman of the Cromer Community Hospital League of Friends, who died in 2017, the hospital was built in 1888 thanks to the "generosity of a Mr Collison".
It was closed when the hospital moved to its current site in Mill Road in 1932.
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Mrs Northway wrote a history of Cromer Hospital, where she recalled a friend inviting her to tea in a part of the former hospital which had been converted to a home.
She said: "We sat in the garden room, which she told me used to be the morgue - as I recall, cupboard doors high in the wall, were where the bodies came through from upstairs.
"I think there must have been a chute as the stairs are very narrow."
The building was later used as a Conservative Club, and then as the Cottage pub, which opened in 2005 and closed in June last year. North Norfolk District Council has granted outline planning permission to convert the building to six two-bedroom flats and two one-bedroom flats. However, members of the Facebook group Enjoy Cromer More have suggested the building be put to another use. One person commented: "I thought it would make a good Wetherspoons."
Another said: "[An] American-style diner with licence and live music would be nice."
And someone else suggested: "A soft play area for kids. Something for the younger generation would be good."
The auction is in the Sunningdale suite at Dunston Hall Hotel, Norwich, at 11am.