A HOUSE on a historic site, that has been described as the most expensive in Stanford-le-Hope, is to be demolished and replaced by a new build home.

Thurrock planning officers have given permission for the five-bedroom home on Billet Lane, which stands in extensive grounds and with adjacent outbuildings, to be demolished and replaced with a new four-bedroom building.

Internet property site 'The Move Market' current values the existing property at £1,507,000. It was last sold in July 2006 for £497,499.

A report published by Thurrock's planning officers approving the scheme says the new dwelling would sit in approximately the same position as the existing house.

It will have a combination pitched and flat roof (the central portion would be flat while the outer areas of the roof would be pitched).

How the new home will look.

Proposed external materials are facing brick, slate roof tiles, cast stone and fibreglass window surrounds, with a cream render/stone finish.

Internally the building would provide largely open plan living accommodation at ground floor with four bedrooms and associated bathrooms/ensuite at first floor. A roof terrace is shown above the projecting rear wing.

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The existing property is described as being 'in a poor state of repair, with damp visible at ground level, several cracks in the brickwork, and a sagging roof'.

The site has had a chequered planning history, with applications being turned down over recent decades for a number of schemes, including one - in 2019 - for 19 dwellings on the site.

And in 2015 planning officers were called in to undertake enforcement proceedings after the site owners started clearing trees that had preservation orders on them, possibly in order to create hardstanding for caravans.

An aerial view of the site and the entrace from Billet Lane.

The site is in the green belt but officers have decreed as the proposal involves the replacement of a single dwelling and, given the proposed siting and scale of the replacement dwelling, it would not lead to any greater intrusion into the green belt than at present.

Planners say: "There would be no detrimental impact by way of loss of openness of the green belt by virtue of the development."

The site of Ivy Walls is of historic interest, though none of the original buildings remain.

Joseph Conrad, the Polish novelist and naturalised British citizen, moved to Stanford-le-Hope in 1896, first to a semi-detached villa in Victoria Road and later across the town to a timber framed medieval farmstead called 'Ivy Walls' in Billet Lane.

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While at Stanford-le-Hope he completed some of his novels, including 'Heart of Darkness'. His first son Borys was born there.