Hospital waiting lists are being redefined — and not just by spin doctors. Developers are queuing up to get hold of the redundant stock of NHS hospitals and asylums. And buyers are adding their names to waiting lists to buy homes in these converted buildings, many of them in parkland settings or city-centre sites.
The NHS is in the process of off-loading 100 sites. In a scheme hatched by John Reid, the health secretary, and John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, sites with a total area of about 4,075 acres will be made available to create about 15,000 homes, with the proceeds of the land deal — at least £400m — ploughed back into the NHS. The government wants a large proportion of the houses and apartments to be affordable to key workers, so nurses could end up living where they used to work.
NHS Estates, which manages the service’s property portfolio, says other surplus property will become available and be sold off privately as older hospitals are replaced.
A new teaching hospital built near the University of East Anglia on the outskirts of Norwich has meant that the old Norfolk and Norwich Hospital on the edge of the city centre is being redeveloped. Here, the grim 1960s tower blocks have been torn down and Persimmon is building homes on the site, including an affordable quota.
Charles Church got hold of the real prize: the listed Victorian buildings of the original hospital. With 350 homes planned by Charles Church in all, buyers camped out the night before the release of phase one of the Fellowes’ Plain site. Prices range from £120,000 for a one-bed apartment to £500,000 for a penthouse. Paul Bennett, the company’s sales and marketing director, says: “We’ve had local investors, private residents, people downsizing, and sold to nurses and first-time buyers.”
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In Brighton, apartments in a Grade II-listed former convalescent home on the seafront have been selling well. A chateau in all but name, the French Apartments were built in the 1890s for patients of London’s French Hospital. Gladedale Homes has just three of 14 apartments left to sell in the converted building, with prices from £399,950.
In Scotland, Edinburgh has a new £150m Royal Infirmary at Little France, a hospital and teaching complex. The city’s old infirmary site, known as Quartermile, was sold by the Lothian University Hospitals Trust to developers who are starting work on a six-year, £400m scheme to transform the area. Norman Foster has created a plan for the 20-acre project, which will see some period buildings retained and refurbished, while others will be replaced. Southside Capital will create about 650 apartments, including 100 affordable homes.
Matthew Benson, director of new homes at lead agent Rettie & Co, which will begin selling the first Quartermile homes off-plan this spring, says: “You are going to get a mix of buildings from Victorian and Edwardian to the contemporary buildings being put forward by Foster.”
Berkeley Homes is building at Knowle Village, near Wickham in Hampshire, where the Grade II-listed 1850s hospital, standing in 55 acres and closed in 1988, has become the focus of a new village of about 500 homes, with a mix of conversion apartments and new houses priced from £280,000.
Chris Maidwell, an interior designer, has bought at the old Horton Hospital near Epsom in Surrey, reinvented as Livingstone Park. Having created a show home for developer Try Homes in Gladstone House, a converted Victorian building on the site, in a development where apartments cost from £195,000 to £335,000, Maidwell bought the apartment next door.
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“The reason I bought here was that it is a conversion with historic value,” he says. “Its old life as a hospital wasn’t important. It was the building and its character that mattered.”
Fellowes’ Plain, 01603 627 595, www.charles-church. co.uk; French Apartments, 01273 672 225, www. gladedale.co.uk; Rettie & Co, 0131 220 4160, www.rettie.co. uk; Knowle Village, 01329 828 179, www.berkeleyhomes. co.uk; Livingstone Park, 01372 742 246, www. tryhomes.co.uk