Sold: the Old Palace site seems set to be occupied by a Serenity special school from September
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Old Palace girls’ school closes in July, with the owners having sold the site, but for less than the £7m guide price. EXCLUSIVE By STEVEN DOWNES
The Old Palace private girls’ school site will likely become home to a special school from September, after the owners, the Whitgift Foundation, agreed a sale in principle in a private equity deal with a small firm of property developers.
The deal is thought to be for less than the £7million guide price the property was listed at “for sale with vacant possession” when it was put on the market in December.
The sale means that the financially squeezed Foundation will have banked around £12million from property disposals in the past few months, having already sold the Melville Road site of Old Palace’s prep school for £7million to a Hindu education organisation.
The difficulty in selling the Old Town senior school site is that it includes several listed buildings, some of which date back to the 1400s – and all of which will require careful and costly maintenance for any new owners.
“Offered as a whole and available as a whole or in part or parts,” estate agents Knight Frank said in their particulars six months ago. It appears that the sale is going forward for “parts” of the site.
The Curwen Group, based in Covent Garden, has made the acquisition of the historic and listed buildings which were once the home of archbishops of Canterbury and where Queen Elizabeth I stayed over more than once. They intend to lease the school site to Serenity, operators of a chain of special schools.
New owners: special arrangements are being negotiated to allow access to the Old Palace buildings and memorials
Old Palace School, founded in 1889 and the only girls’ school managed by the Whitgift Foundation, is due to close its gates for a final time at the end of this summer term in July.
In a letter sent this week to Old Palace old girls by the Foundation’s chief executive, Roisha Hughes, she said, “We are now in advanced legal negotiations with a purchaser for a significant proportion of the senior school site: The Great Hall, Old Palace, Science Block and Cathedral Building.
“The purchaser, Curwen Group, will be leasing the site to Serenity Schools which intends to open a special educational needs school on the site from this September.
“We are working towards exchange of contracts and completion later this summer.”
In her letter, Hughes undertook to provide further updates connected with public access to the buildings for Old Palace events, and the memorials on the site. “I am able to share that our conversations with the purchaser have been very constructive on both these points and we very much believe that, assuming the sale proceeds, arrangements will give alumnae access for the annual event and peace of mind for families and the wider community around memorials.”
The sale arrangements for such a sensitive site are being reviewed by Historic England, with an enhanced listing application being considered.
As you might expect, Hughes’ letter made no mention of the price being paid for the site, but her omission of any mention of the more modern Shah Building, where Old Palace sixth formers studied, strongly suggests that it was not required by Curwen or Serenity.
Inside Croydon understands that the Whitgift Foundation is paying in the order of £1million a year in rent for the Shah Building, where they have a lease arrangement with 20 years still to run.
Site plan: how the estate agents’ brochure mapped out the property for sale
Finding a buyer that wants to use the site as a school will undoubtedly be a welcome relief to the Foundation’s governors, several of whom are appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Serenity group already operates special schools in Eltham, Crawley and Maidstone, and they have a secondary on Rowan’s Hill in Coulsdon.
They say, “We are a unique provision following a holistic approach to education and childhood development. We cater to pupils with a range of learning needs, and we pride ourselves on our persistent pursuit of excellence for each child, from enrolment to graduation.”
The closure of Old Palace of John Whitgift School is a direct consequence of the Foundation’s £1billion gamble to create a new “palace”, a retailing supermall to replace the ageing Whitgift Centre shopping centre.
Announced in 2012, the development has been stalled by the developers’ reluctance to commit to what was promised to be a £1.4billion regeneration of Croydon town centre, but which has instead delivered a decade of blight for existing businesses and residents.
Old Palace School is a significant casualty of that blight. As was first reported by Inside Croydon, the Whitgift Foundation determined that “the sustainability of the school beyond the short-term [is] impossible”.
The closure was highly controversial when announced in 2023, the decision linked to the Foundation’s worsening financial position. The sale of Old Palace in Old Town and its Melville Avenue prep school site in South Croydon will only cover a small part of the £55million lost from the Foundation’s unrestricted funds since 2017.
According to a recent Inside Croydon interview with Roisha Hughes, the delays in delivering any development in Croydon town centre through Unibail Rodamco Westfield will likely now only be overcome by the contribution of tens of millions of pounds of public money towards the build costs of thousands of flats on the site of the Whitgift Centre.
Read more: Foundation sets £7m price tag on Old Palace’s listed buildings
Read more: Whitgift Foundation decides to close Old Palace School in 2025
Read more: Crumbling finances see troubled Foundation lose millions more
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The fate of the “tennis courts” on Howley Road and Cranmer Road is unclear. As can be seen from the house numbers on either side of these open spaces, the gaps in between were once occupied by homes.
During the Blitz these were destroyed, subsequently providing the opportunity for their clearance and use by Old Palace School.
If Serenity don’t want their kids playing there, the land will be ripe for redevelopment for new housing.
Although, all except one house (no. 2A, built about 5 years ago) in Howley Road was built in 1886*, the Luftwaffe in WW2 created the space for what is now the Old Palace School MUGA during WW2. Technically, this wasn’t during the Blitz (which was only for 8 months from Sep 1940 to May 1941, before Nazi Germany made a big mistake and concentrated on trying to invade Russia instead !). This damage was caused by a V1 bomb (known as V1: 107 in Croydon) on 27/28 July 1944, which landed in front of nos. 28 & 30 Cranmer Rd, and made a mess of the whole area. Cranmer Rd still has a few original 1880s houses, but mainly has at least two generations of more modern houses, so more infill housing on the MUGA area seems like a good use of the land ?!
[Nos. 17 to 31 Howley Rd may have been rebuilt/repaired after the war/bomb attack above?]
Are Historic England going to be happy for a special school to be using a Grade I listed building as bits of the Old Palace site are? I cam imagine them doing an inspection, finding some priceless feature of the old building destroyed, and the school staff just shrugging their shoulders and saying “It is a school….what did you expect?”
It’s been used as a school for more than a century.