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A hotel in the New Forest that has links to Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle could be completely demolished since the building has fallen into a “perilous condition”.
Lyndhurst Park Hotel, found in the historical Hampshire village its named after in the New Forest, is an early 19th-century mansion that was known as Glasshayes House before it was converted into a hotel.
The structure remained a hotel until it closed in 2014, yet site developers say that it has been in a state of deterioration since then, to the point that the building has “partially self-demolished”, according to local paper The Advertiser and Times.
While previous proposals for housing development on the hotel’s site were approved in 2021, including retaining its notable façade, a town planner has now recommended that the hotel should be destroyed and then reconstructed.
The New Forest National Park Authority’s (NPA) planning committee received a recommendation to consider new plans that would see the façade flattened as it has experienced a structural failure.
Developers Burry & Knight, an arm of the site owners Hoburne Developments Ltd, applied to drop the requirement of keeping the façade this year after claiming it was unsafe.
The unique hotel has gained the attention of campaign groups such as the Victorian Society, which focuses on protecting Victorian and Edwardian architectural heritage.
The society says that Lyndhurst Park Hotel is the only known surviving example of Arthur Conan Doyle’s solo architectural design, which is believed to have been based on the writer’s spiritualism.
Sketches of the building by Conan Doyle dating back to 1912 were discovered by historian Brice Stratford, showing a redesign of part of the hotel.
While the developers want to knock down the remaining parts of the building, they say they intend to rebuild it reinstating Conan Doyle’s design elements, the local paper said.
According to The Advertiser and Times, the Victorian Society has opposed the new plans, saying that the “proposed complete demolition of the buildings is not justified when previous engineers’ reports have highlighted ways in which the structure could have been preserved and stabilised, yet these have not been executed”.
However, the site owners claim that “reasonable steps” have been taken to try to restore the historic fabric of the hotel, but it had already fallen into disrepair before they acquired the site.
A report by the NPA ahead of the committee meeting on Tuesday said it was clear that the historic hotel was in a “perilous condition”, and the previously approved scheme for keeping the façade up was no longer viable.
A separate report from developers said that the building had “endured significant water ingress” while it was vacant for several years, and recommended that it be demolished and rebuilt.
“As the building is not safe to either work within nor near due to risk of further collapse, no strengthening or façade retention works can be safely carried out,” they wrote, according to the BBC.
A large part of the hotel has already been demolished as the site developers continue with their plan of building 79 homes on the property.
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