Legal & General is to develop a luxury later-living housing scheme at its former Surrey HQ in Kingswood.
The 380,066 sq ft Grade II listed office campus sits on 43 acres of green belt land.
L&G will seek to develop around 300 retirement homes, alongside on-site facilities including a wellness centre, and dining and recreation facilities that would be open to the public. The homes would be a combination of one- and two-bedroom apartments with prices up to £1m.
The development will be led by L&G’s Inspired Villages Group, which it acquired in 2017. Inspired Villages’ chief executive, Jamie Bunce, has presented the plan to the local residents association and will meet with the chair in the coming weeks to discuss plans in further detail.
Plans will be available for public consultation on 17 and 18 May, before a planning application which is expected to be submitted around September. Construction is expected to last five years.
Development on the large green belt site has been met with fierce opposition from locals, however. One residents association member said: “This is green belt land and it would cause chaos to the local neighbourhood.”
L&G first moved to the Kingswood campus during the Second World War. In 2005, it agreed a 20-year lease for the entire property, with five-yearly rent reviews, with owner British Land. A year later, BL sold the site for £73.6m to Kingswood Property Holdings, a consortium backed by the Royal Bank of Scotland.
In January 2016, L&G announced it would close the Kingswood campus, which was home to its assurance division, in a phased process ending in the summer of 2018.
At the time, Simon Burke, group commercial director at L&G, said: “The Kingswood building, for all its history and strengths, is our least adaptable building to changing business demands, and has high rent and running costs.”
Knight Frank was appointed by joint LPA receivers Steve Absolom and Rob Croxen of KPMG to sell the Kingswood Campus, as either a residential development or income-producing opportunity, with a price tag of £70m. L&G bought the site from the administrators the following year.
Inspired Villages specialises in creating retirement communities that encourage social, physical and mental activity and participation. It has seven sites in Warwickshire, West Sussex, Devon, Kent, Cheshire and Hampshire, comprising 1,000 homes, with a goal to deliver 8,500 homes by 2022.
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