Housebuilder Barratt is to build 1500 homes on eight former hospital sites in London and the South-east.
The houses’ combined worth will be above £280m and more than 300 of them will be affordable homes.

The sites, totalling more than 30 ha, are:

  • Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire: 303 homes close to Stansted airport;
  • Chatham, Kent: 262 homes on a 4.5 ha former maternity hospital site;
  • Hillingdon, north-west London: 175 homes;
  • Harrow, north-west London: more than 130 homes on a site acquired from the Harrow Primary Care Trust;
  • Colchester, Essex: 179 homes on the St Mary’s hospital site;
  • Colchester, Essex: 217 homes on The Mylands & The Oaks hospital site;
  • Chelmsford, Essex: 85 homes worth more than £17m will be built on a 2.6 ha site;
  • Dartford, Kent: 188 homes on the 6.5 ha site of a Victorian mental asylum.

Barratt Southern chairman David Pretty said the reorganisation of the NHS meant many hospital sites had become redundant.

“A lot of the forbidding old Victorian hospital buildings are no longer workable. Nor are many of the bleak sprawling prefabricated campuses that have sprung up since the war,” he said.