Mystery buyer snaps up Peterborough's landmark £2.8 million Guild House

A new era beckons for a landmark building in Peterborough which has been snapped up by a mystery buyer.

The 60-year-old Guild House, in Oundle Road, has been sold for an undisclosed sum by its former owners Anglia Ruskin University.

The sale comes nearly a year after the three storey building was put on the market.

A university spokesman said: “We have now sold Guild House.

"The sale was completed in March this year.”

Filing at the Land Registry show that the university bought Guild House on July 16, 2010 for £2,400,000 plus VAT of £420,000.

Details of the latest sale have not yet been published.

The building which is spread across 60,000 square feet on a 3.69 acres site has been put to a variety of uses over the last six decades.

These include most recently as a centre for the training of nurses and midwives by the university’s Faculty of Health, Education, Medicine and Social Care.

The faculty has since moved to the campus of Peterborough’s new £30 million university off Bishop’s Road, on the Embankment.

Guild House was built in 1962 for Mitchell Construction. It became the home of ARU’s Faculty of Health and Social Care, which had been at the former Peterborough General Hospital, in 2011 with the help of a £500,000 grant from Peterborough City Council.

It has also been used as offices by British Sugar.

Commercial agents Eddisons, which oversaw the sale, had stated that the property lent itself to a wide range of alternative uses including as offices, as a hotel, for medical purposes or for conversion to residential.

With the growing trend for living in the city centre, it is thought one of the most likely uses of the building will be as accommodation

A number of companies and organisations are currently involved in building apartments or converting offices into flats across the city.

These include social housing association Cross Keys Homes, in Shrewsbury Avenue, which owns properties in Swain Court, near Guild House, and which in partnership with Peterborough City Council, has created Medesham Homes to deliver affordable homes, and which recently bought the Pleasure Meadow Car Park just off Oundle Road.