User:WhaleyTim/Sandbox : Buxton Crescent Redevelopment

Current developments

In 1993 with funding from the National Heritage Memorial Fund the High Peak Borough Council purchased the Crescent to act as a temporary caretaker of the building until a suitable buyer could be found. A grant of £1.5 million from English Heritage was used to to make the building weathertight. The Crescent, Pump Rooms and Natural Baths buildings were then jointly marketed by the the borough and county councils. In 1994 the Monumental Trust proposed a schem to convert the Crescent into flats, however no funding was found. In December 2000 the combined councils applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund for funding of plans to restore the Crescent as a hotel and to build new spa facilities. Funding was approved in July 2003. Work to restore, redevelop and manage the hotel and spa was put out to tender, which was won by a partnership of the Trevor Osborne Property Group Limited and CP Holdings Limited, the parent company of the spa hotel specialists Danubius hotels, in December 2003. The then £23 million plan was scheduled for completion in 2007.

However the project suffered a series of delays, including funding and the technical and legal issues relating to the continued supply of spa water from springs beneath the buildings to Nestle, the bottler of Buxton Water, and it was not until April 2012 that an agreement between the joint councils and the developer to start the first phase of the project could be signed.. Phase I work on the now £35 million project for a 79-bedroom 5-star hotel, natural baths, a visitor interpretation centre, a thermal mineral water spa and specialist shops commenced in the summer of 2012.