Shelter to go under hammer (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Shelter to go under hammer

A COTTAGE in Whiteparish that has been used as a night shelter is to be auctioned in London next Thursday.

Harestock Cottage, which is owned by Salisbury district council, will be auctioned by Colliers CRE at the Radisson SAS Portman Hotel, in Portman Square.

The cottage is the seventh of 36 lots and has a guide price of £275,000.

It was leased to Salisbury Trust for the Homeless as a night shelter from 1997 until October 2002, and before that was used as a homeless families' hostel.

The auction catalogue describes the cottage, a two-storey brick-built property with a timber-clad extension alongside the A36, as "an ex-residential health care building with development potential.

"Internally the property is in poor decorative condition and laid out as eight bedrooms, many with en suite facilities, kitchen, lounge, dining room, staff areas and office," it says.

"There are landscaped gardens and a parking area and the site extends to approximately .85 acres."

Harestock Cottage, the latest in a series of emergency shelters for people sleeping rough in Salisbury during the coldest months of the year, was run by the trust's accommodation officer, Jackie Spencer-Taylor, who died earlier this month following a car crash.

Andrew Reynolds, head of strategic housing for the council, told the Journal before Christmas that the council had a duty to get the best possible price for the property and had opted for auction as the method of achieving this.

He said Harestock Cottage had suffered from being remote from Salisbury, where the greatest need was, and the requirement to lay on transport had made it costly to run.

The council's long-term aim was to try to develop a crisis assessment centre, which would incorporate a night shelter, but trying to find a suitable property in Salisbury was difficult, he said.

He added that someone might want to demolish Harestock Cottage and rebuild on the site.

The planning use of the building is as a guest house, so any scheme to develop the site would need planning permission.