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- ldyson@thekmgroup.co.uk
A banker’s bonuses are being spent on restoring part of the town’s historic dockyard.
Hidden behind the wall of the docks lies a collection of 19th century properties.
Restorers The Spitalfields Trust bought the buildings in 2011 in a deal worth £1.85 million.
They include Dockyard House, a Grade II* listed Georgian mansion that was built around 1825 to house the naval superintendent and his family.
It was converted into offices after the docks were bought for commercial use in 1962.
An unknown London banker, who now owns it, is spending millions of pounds of his own money to convert the property back into a family home with the help of the trust.
The eco-friendly investor has had ground source heat pumps drilled 120 metres below the surface to extract warmth from the soil.
Maidstone firm Kent Conservation and Restoration Limited are painstakingly renovating decorative plasterwork, joinery and stone to how it would have looked originally.
The other properties include Regency Terrace, a group of five Grade II* listed town houses from the 1820s.
They were divided into 15 flats in the 1960s but now are being turned back into dwellings. Work is being carried out inside one of them by a private owner.
A new occupant is also being sought to turn a Grade II 19th Century former police house nearby into a home.
Oliver Leigh-Wood, administrator of the trust, hopes the acquisition of the Sheerness Dockyard Church through a Compulsory Purchase Order earlier this month will be a “catalyst” for the restoration of the other listed buildings.
He said: “It is the largest collection of unrepaired dockyard buildings in the country and it is obviously incredibly important a new use is found for them and we are very lucky that private individuals want to turn them back into private houses.
“It’s all very well sneering at [bankers’ bonuses] but all this is being spent in repairing part of England’s heritage. People should be very grateful it is being spent in this way.”
Peter Bell, Swale council’s conservation officer, said: “I have been pursuing this site for over a decade with the council because when it was originally sold to a private owner it was in bad condition.”
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