Pelican Inn Site: Owners Given Six Months to Fix or Clear

Trafford Council has served a formal notice on those responsible for the derelict Altrincham North Lodge on Manchester Road, West Timperley. They have six months to carry out substantial repairs, or to demolish the building and clear the site (Trafford Council, 17 August 2026).

If the work is not done, the council says it can carry it out itself and try to recover the cost.

The Lodge is the hotel building at the back of the site. The pub at the front, the Pelican Inn, is a separate matter, and the difference turns out to be the whole story. Both have been shut since 2020.

What the council says

The council’s account of the site is short:

• The former Pelican Inn and Altrincham North Lodge have been closed since 2020.
• The buildings have become “increasingly derelict and insecure”.
• There was a further fire at the site in April 2026.
• The council took emergency action in May to secure the buildings.
• Those measures reduced the risk of people getting in, but “did not address the underlying condition of the Lodge itself”.

The council adds that it has seen proposals to refurbish the 1930s mock Tudor Pelican building, designed by the local architect George Wescott, but that “there appears to be little prospect of the Lodge being brought back into beneficial use”.

Cllr Keleigh Glenton, the council’s executive member for community safety and civil contingencies, said the former lodge “has suffered years of deterioration and has been the subject of repeated incidents involving trespass, vandalism and fire damage”. She said the council had taken formal action “to secure a long-term solution”.

The part the announcement leaves out

The site has not been ignored for six years. It has been stuck.

In September 2021, New Care (Altringham) Ltd applied to demolish everything on the site and build a 75-bed care home and 22 apartments, five of them affordable, with new access, parking and open space. The reference is 105786/FUL/21 (Trafford planning register).

The council did not decide it in time. The applicant appealed on the grounds of non-determination, which takes the decision out of the council’s hands. A planning inspector, Samuel Watson, visited on 24 August 2022 and dismissed the appeal on 14 October 2022, reference APP/Q4245/W/22/3296154.

His reasons matter now, because they are the reason the buildings are still standing:

• The council had identified the Pelican Inn as a non-designated heritage asset. The inspector agreed. He described the mock-Tudor pub as being “of a relatively rare style nationally”, still sitting among the houses it was built to serve, with its front and two sides “generally intact”.
• The hotel building was a different case entirely. He called it “relatively modern and low-quality design”, said it bore “little relationship” to the pub or the houses next to it, and found its loss would not harm the area.
• The replacement buildings would have been three to four storeys on a street of two-storey houses, and would “appear out of keeping”.
• Losing the pub would harm the community. He found ten other pubs within 2km were not close enough to serve the same catchment.
• The two years of marketing put forward by the applicant ran mostly through the Covid-19 pandemic, so he found it “not representative of the norm”.

On the state of the buildings, the inspector was blunt: “the damages have occurred since the property closed and as a result of it remaining vacant”.

He accepted the affordable housing offer and the standard of the flats. The scheme failed on the pub and on the design.

The planning register carries no later application for the site. A search on the postcode WA14 5NH returns nothing for the Pelican after 2021.

How the site got here

What it means for you

For residents on and around Manchester Road, the notice sets a clock. Six months from service, the Lodge is either substantially repaired or gone, or the council can do the work and bill for it.

It does not settle what happens to the Pelican Inn. The council’s own wording separates the two: it has seen refurbishment proposals for the pub, and sees little prospect for the Lodge. The inspector’s 2022 finding still stands, that the pub is a non-designated heritage asset and that its loss would harm the community. Anything that involves demolishing it would have to answer that finding.

The council has not said which statutory power the notice is served under, and notices of this kind are not published on the planning register. If a fresh application comes forward for the site, it will appear on the weekly list, and we will pick it up in our Altrincham planning news.

Two practical points. The notice runs from the date it was served, which the council has not published, so the six months does not necessarily run from the 17 August announcement. And “substantial repair works” is not defined in the announcement, so what counts as compliance is between the council and the owners.

Sources

• Trafford Council: Council takes action against owners of derelict Altrincham North Lodge site, 17 August 2026 for the notice, the six-month period, the closure date, the April 2026 fire, the May emergency action and the councillor’s comments.
• Trafford planning register: 105786/FUL/21, Pelican Inn and Hotel, 350 Manchester Road for the application, its dates, the June 2022 committee date and the appeal outcome.
• Appeal decision APP/Q4245/W/22/3296154, Inspector Samuel Watson, 14 October 2022, published on the council’s planning register for the heritage finding, the community-facility finding, the scheme size and the quoted passages.