The freehold for Cheadle’s George & Dragon pub is for sale. Dorbiere are asking £425,000 for the Grade II listed building.

Pam and Keith joined prospective buyers to take a look round on Tuesday, particularly bearing in mind that several residents have expressed interest in some form of community buy-out.

The building’s a large one – the public bar areas on the ground floor, meeting rooms with another bar on the first floor and several bedrooms on the second floor. In addition there are a couple of outbuildings (one of which housed the previous landlord’s TVR I seem to remember – and very nice it was too).

It has planning permission for a rear extension, and it’s current allowed use as a pub would allow it to be converted into a shop.

The internal condition of the property is poor. Not only does it clearly need redecorating through out, but a number of internal walls have been partially knocked out and that would clearly need fixing.

That explains why such a large site is being sold for £425,000 – a further investment of several hundred thousand pounds would be needed to bring the building up to standard.

That’s probably the bad news. The better news is that Keith and Pam were far from the only people interested in the George and Dragon. Five or six other potential buyers were having a look round at the same time, with others at other times so there’s clearly a decent amount of commercial interest in the site.

Currently we don’t have anything approaching a plan of what we as a community could do with the site which would give us reasonable confidence in getting a return on an investment of around a million pounds. If you do have an idea that could be developed into a business plan, please let us know quickly!

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