Two properties on Bloomsbury’s Gordon Square, WC1, are being offered to the market for the first time in 130 years.
The Trustees of Dr Williams’s Trust have instructed Knight Frank to sell Dr Williams’s Library, at 14-15 Gordon Square (pictured above), and the Henry Morley Building, which sits to the rear.
Knight Frank is guiding offers in excess of £15.5m for both properties.
Gordon Square is best known as the epicentre of the Bloomsbury Group in the first half of the 20th century. Notable former residents of the square include Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes.
Dr Williams’s Library is a Grade II listed property built in a Tudor style. It extends to almost 28,000 sq ft across its five upper storeys, along with a basement and raised ground floor.
Overlooking Gordon Square, the building will be sold with vacant possession and has the potential for alternative uses, or redevelopment into residential, educational, hotel, leisure or office use, subject to planning and other consents.
The library was established by the will of nonconformist minister Dr Daniel Williams, who died in January 1716. Its collection on theology, philosophy, religion, history and literature is in the process of being rehoused. The building was constructed in 1848-49 as University Hall to mark the passing of the Dissenters’ Chapels Act of 1844.
The 5,400 sq ft Henry Morley building has three floors and is let on a long lease to University College London.
Emma Cleugh, head of the education and charities team at Knight Frank, said: “Consent is already in place to reconfigure the accommodation into offices, which means a party looking for their next project can come in and can put their own stamp on things straight away.
“Being in Bloomsbury, London’s intellectual and literary epicentre, means this opportunity is likely to pique the interest of multiple university and educational requirements that are in the market at present.”
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