Canons Cottages went to Canons Brook Golf Club for £560,000 and land by the Old Harlow Medical Centre to its doctors for £100,000. Seven sites are still to go.

Harlow Council has agreed to sell a pair of cottages on Edinburgh Way to Canons Brook Golf Club for £560,000, and a strip of land next to the Old Harlow Medical Centre to the doctors who run it for £100,000. Both decisions were taken by the Leader of the Council on 6 August and published the following day, in one decision record for the cottages and another for the land.

They are the only two of nine council-owned sites to appear so far in the council’s published decision records, from a list that Cabinet approved for disposal on 9 October 2025, under a policy of selling assets that “either require significant investment and serve no operational purpose or provide no material benefit to Harlow residents”.

Together they raise £660,000. What the council expected to raise from the full nine has never been made public: the pricing expectations sit in an appendix that Cabinet classed as exempt under paragraph 3 of Schedule 12A of the Local Government Act 1972, covering financial and business affairs.

The golf club was already the tenant

1 and 2 Canons Cottages are a pair of semi-detached houses on Edinburgh Way, in the Little Parndon and Town Centre ward, which the council has been letting to Canons Brook Golf Club Ltd to house its grounds maintenance staff. The club made an unconditional offer of £560,000 on 26 June this year, according to the report signed by the Leader, and it came with building survey reports listing repair and maintenance problems that would fall to the council if it held on to the properties.

The council did not put the cottages on the open market. The report is direct about the reasoning: because the club already holds a lease and has an operational need for the houses, it counts as a “special purchaser”, one that may attribute a value to a property “that would not necessarily be available from purchasers without that existing connection”. Selling by private treaty was therefore judged commercially appropriate.

That matters legally. Section 123 of the Local Government Act 1972 obliges a council to secure the best consideration reasonably obtainable when it sells land, and open marketing is the usual way of proving it did. In place of marketing, the council commissioned external valuation advice, which it says confirms that £560,000 “is at market level” given the condition of the houses and the club’s existing interest.

The alternative was renewing the club’s lease and keeping the cottages. Officers advised against it: they would be likely to need capital investment and repairs, and would not produce the immediate receipt the council’s medium term financial plan needs. This year’s non-housing capital programme is funded in part by £5m of capital receipts.

A surgery buying room to grow

The second sale is smaller and does something more visible. The doctors operating the Old Harlow Medical Centre offered £100,000 for the freehold of the land next door, and the decision record says the sale is intended “to facilitate the expansion of the Old Harlow Medical Centre, supporting its ongoing viability and its capacity to serve the growing local population”.

The council had been using the land to sell parking permits, and considered keeping it on that basis, but concluded that carrying on “would prevent the planned expansion” and waste the chance to turn an underperforming asset into cash.

One string is attached that the council will pay for itself. Selling the land triggers a clawback liability owed to Homes England, and the decision authorises paying that out of the appropriate proportion of the capital receipt. The record does not say how much that is, so the £100,000 is not what the council keeps.

The timing is worth noting alongside a separate document published this month. In the officer’s report on the proposed 64-bed care home and shop at Gilden Park, elsewhere in Old Harlow, the NHS Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care Board said the GP practice near that site has no capacity for the growth coming, and asked for £44,600 towards health infrastructure. The board did not name the practice, so the two documents cannot be read as referring to the same surgery, but both point at the same pressure in the same corner of the district.

What it means for you

Nothing changes for residents at either site straight away. The cottages are occupied by the golf club’s staff under an existing arrangement and the sale transfers the freehold rather than emptying them; the medical centre land is a plot the surgery intends to build on, and any expansion will need its own planning permission before anything happens on the ground.

The wider point is the seven sites still to come, and some are places people know: the Garden Tiger public house, Herons Wood Depot, Stewards Farm, Barrows Farm Cottage, the Hides Garage Site, land off Red Lion Lane and vacant plots at Harlow Innovation Park. Cabinet also noted in October 2025 that a further review of the estate in spring 2026 could add more.

Because these sales are signed off by the Leader under delegated authority rather than debated at a public meeting, the decision record is where each one surfaces, usually a day or two after it is made. They are published on the council’s decisions pages, and we will report the rest as they appear. For what happens after a site changes hands, our Harlow planning news page follows the applications that follow.