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Council drops sale of Coulsdon Manor Hotel and golf course

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Below par: the Coulsdon Manor Hotel and the 140-acre golf course have been removed from sale by cash-strapped Croydon Council

Our south of the borough correspondent, PEARL LEE, on another massive hole in the council’s budgets

Croydon Council has taken Coulsdon Manor Hotel off the market.

The grand country house, sitting in a 140-acre parkland golf course, was put out for offers in July 2021, part of the fire sale of the cash-strapped council’s assets after the previous Labour administration had crashed the borough’s finances.

Katharine Street sources suggest that council officers had suggested that the hotel sale could put as much as £750,000 into the financially embarrassed Town Hall coffers.

There has been no official announcement about the withdrawal of the hotel from sale on the council website, not even so much as a tweet on part-time Perry’s mayoral account. But word has been dribbled out from a Tory councillor in Coulsdon to the local residents’ associations that the Coulsdon Manor Hotel and the accompanying golf course are no longer being sold.

This move is, according to Councillor Margaret Bird, because Mayor Perry is “listening” to residents’ concerns.

Coulsdon councillor: Margaret Bird

More likely, though, the hotel has been removed from sale because – after 14 months on the market – the council couldn’t find a buyer. Post-covid, the hotel business ain’t in great shape.

A 42-room hotel in suburban south London in 2022 is as likely to prove to be a business liability as a profitable enterprise, especially a building which, by most accounts, requires considerable money spending on maintenance and refurbishment.

What was once known as Coulsdon Court, from the days it was the home of the Byron family, was bought by the Coulsdon and Purley Urban District Council in 1937. The golf course, which was opened as a private club in 1926, has been a pay-as-you-play public course for the last 85 years.

Bespoke Hotels have operated the re-styled Coulsdon Manor Hotel and the golf course under long-term leases from Croydon Council for more than 20 years.

According to official council reports last year, in 1999 Bespoke took on the golf club by paying an initial premium of £150,000 and they have since paid a seemingly modest annual rental of around £19,000, “based upon a percentage of the turnover income”.

Clubhouse: Coulsdon Manor has had a tough couple of years

The council report said that the hotel, with its function rooms and restaurant, “is let on a separate lease of a similar length with 103 years remaining but is on a peppercorn rent. An initial premium of £600,000 was paid in 1999 for the lease”.

It is thought that Bespoke made the first approach to the council with a view to buying the property. But that initial enthusiasm appears to have waned.

Potential difficulties over access roads and the need for refurbishment – the hotel closed its squash club six years ago – and restricted options for developing some of the site around the hotel for housing may have made the purchase less attractive.

The building and the surrounding green acres are on the Local List of Historic Parks and Gardens, which restricts how the building and the site can be used for development. The adjoining Coulsdon Court Woods form part of a Site of Nature Conservation Importance, and the entire site is in the Metropolitan Green Belt.

This all leaves Mayor Perry’s Tory council with another hole in its already threadbare budget – they had managed to overspend by more than £18million in their first three months in office.

And it will be up to the council, as the owners of the hotel, to meet the costs of any maintenance and repairs required to the hotel’s old buildings.

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