In short:
- The Grade II-listed Greenwich Borough Hall was sold to the developer Lita Homes for £2.475 million in January.
- The building was part of the old Greenwich Town Hall, but most of the rest of the building, including its clock tower, has been in private hands since the 1970s.
- Greenwich Council only revealed the Borough Hall's sale after being contacted by The Greenwich Wire. It is the third listed building in the area to be sold by the council in the past nine years.
Updated story: Greenwich Council has sold the much-loved Borough Hall to a developer for £2.475 million – quashing hopes that the building would be brought back into public use.
A sign has been placed on the entrance to the building – once part of the old Greenwich Town Hall – declaring that it has been bought by Lita Homes, the developer behind plans to build flats and a new stadium for the non-league football club Welling United.
The building was placed on an “at risk” register by the Theatres Trust in October 2022. It was put up for sale in 2020 after plans to lease it to a theatre company fell through.
Despite the huge public interest in the fate of the Grade II-listed building, Greenwich made no public announcement about a sale until late on Thursday afternoon, after it had been contacted by The Greenwich Wire the previous morning.
A council spokesperson confirmed that a freehold sale went through in January and said: “We look forward to seeing the new lease of life that the Grade II-listed Greenwich Borough Halls will have under its new owners, Greenwich Investments London Ltd. We hope that it will celebrate the building’s architectural heritage and bring wider benefits to the area.”
Greenwich Investments London Ltd is controlled by Xhevat Lita, the owner of Lita Homes. Companies House records show that a mortgage was taken out on the Borough Hall on January 17, the same day as the sale went through.
Earlier this year, in a separate deal, the council spent nearly £14 million on buying 33 homes from Lita at Sandy Hill Road in Woolwich for use as council housing.
The Borough Hall, on Royal Hill, west Greenwich, was built in 1939. It formed part of the headquarters of the old Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich until 1965, when it merged with Woolwich to form the current council.
The rest of the complex, including its distinctive clock tower, was sold off as offices in 1973. Last month another developer, Riverlow, won permission to turn the block into 80 private rented flats, with limited public access to the clock tower.
But the council held on to the Borough Hall, hosting concerts there through the 1970s and 1980s and leasing it to Greenwich Dance in the 1990s. The group – which closed last December – left in 2018 as ill-fated plans to lease the hall to the Deptford-based theatre company Selladoor Worldwide took shape.
At the time, the council said it would cost at least £10 million to refurbish the hall and remove asbestos, a figure disputed behind the scenes by some councillors.
Selladoor had planned to add a rooftop bar and extend the main hall to seat more than 600 people — making it a bigger venue than Greenwich Theatre, which some councillors feared would be threatened by the proposal.
The plans fell through in 2020 and the building was put on the market.
Lita, which is based in Charlton, will be under public scrutiny to deliver on its plans – particularly as the Borough Hall is in the “buffer zone” of the Maritime Greenwich world heritage site.
The Borough Hall is the third Grade II-listed public building in SE10 to be sold by the Labour-run council in the past nine years. None of the sales were revealed to the public when the transactions were made.
The old Arches leisure centre on Trafalgar Road was sold in December 2015 to Meritcape, a Barnet-based builder, for £16.2 million, to pay for the new Greenwich Centre, which replaced it. The inside of the building has been stripped out but little else has happened, with neighbours reporting that it has recently been squatted.
In 2019, the council sold the old East Greenwich Library on Woolwich Road to the Redeemed Christian Church of God for £1.9 million, again to pay for the Greenwich Centre. One councillor said he was “disgusted” by the deal because the church’s founder has branded gay marriage “evil”, although promises of an investigation from Chris Lloyd, then the chair of scrutiny, were not followed through. Plans to refurbish the crumbling building were finally approved in November last year, although it remains in a poor condition.
The council told The Greenwich Wire that it does not routinely make public announcements when an asset is sold.
Updated at 9.50pm with council confirmation and details of the sale, including the price, and again on Friday to add a summary box at the top after an architecture critic posted misleading claims about this story on social media.
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