Plans have been drawn up to turn a former Cromer pub and cottage hospital into six homes.
NN Developments of Hunstanton has asked North Norfolk District Council to approve its plans for ‘The Cottage’ at 8 Louden Road, after the building sold at auction on February 12 for £378,500.
The building had already been granted outline planning permission for the project before its sale.
Documents sent to the council on behalf of the site’s new owners say: “Whilst it is acknowledged that the proposal would inevitably have a localised impact, it is sensitive to the wider town centre and conservation area.
“The proposal would not be obtrusive or visually dominant with minimal external alterations proposed, thus reducing any associated impacts significantly.
“It is anticipated that once developed, the building will enhance its setting and those of neighbouring buildings.
“It is located on the northern side of Louden Road, a one-way street, which has a number of uses, both commercial and residential.”
The plan is for the building, which is Grade II-listed, to become five two-bedroom flats and one three-bedroom maisonette.
MORE: Former pub up for grabs for £350,000The site would keep its six parking spaces, and a 90cm-high wall would be build along part of the Louden Road frontage.
The building’s existing facade would be kept.
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.
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.”
The building was later used as a Conservative Club, and as the Cottage pub, which opened in 2005 and closed in June last year.
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