Richard Batson Detailed plans of Cromer's planned new £26m hospital will be showcased in the town this month.Local people will see architects' impressions of what the long-awaited rebuild will look like.

Richard Batson

Detailed plans of Cromer's planned new £26m hospital will be showcased in the town this month.

Local people will see architects' impressions of what the long-awaited rebuild will look like.

The consultation comes ahead of plans being lodged this autumn, with work due to start next summer, for completion by 2011.

More than half the price tag is being covered by major legacies - £13m from Cromer millionaires Sagle Bernstein in 2001 and £1m from Bacton holiday chalet owner Phyllis Cox four years later.

The other £12m comes from the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital Trust, which runs the Cromer unit as a north Norfolk satellite to its services.

Trust spokesman Andrew Stronach said the delays in bringing the rebuild to fruition had been a “huge frustration” to the trust and local staff.

“There have been false dawns from earlier plans before the health service re-organisation, but we are in control of this now,” he added.

The current plans are almost twice the scale of a £14m scheme which was previously on the table, until the trust discovered it had greater financial freedom under its new foundation hospital status, which chairman David Prior enabled them to “invest money into a long-awaited new hospital for the people of north Norfolk.”

He added: “We believe that local people will benefit from the wider range of services we aim to be able to provide at Cromer from out-patient services, day case surgery, to minor injuries and therapy services".

At the 10am to 8pm drop-in session on Thursday October 23 at Cromer Community Centre, formerly the WI Hall, on Garden Street people can meet representatives from the hospital trust, the designers from award-winning architects David Bissonnet and the builders Mansell, who will be on hand to explain the plans and answer questions.

The new hospital will replace the original Mill Road hospital which first opened in 1932. It will have a range of facilities including two general anaesthetic operating theatres, an out-patient procedure room and an ophthalmic theatre plus new diagnostic services including a permanent on-site breast screening service, a scanner for osteoporosis diagnosis, as well as facilities for a mobile MRI scanner.

Mr Stronach said there would be months of disruption when work began, but it would be kept to a minimum, and it was aimed to keep all the health services operating on the site during construction.