A housing developer has successfully completed the purchase of the Killearn Hospital site and its surrounding grounds.
Cala Homes (West) say it is a step towards creating a new community offering 89 high-quality homes, expansive landscaped green spaces and connectivity links to the local Killearn village.
In 2023, the housebuilder expects to undertake a programme of extensive remedial and demolition work, likely to take up to nine months in total, before site works start for the new community in autumn 2023.
Planning approval was granted by Stirling Council at the start of the year to deliver 89 new homes featuring bungalows, terraced, semi-detached and detached homes. The site will offer green space, including a new village green and a children’s play area plus a new footway and cycle path to the village.
Graham McNeil, land director, Cala Homes West said: “We are especially pleased to have concluded the purchase of Killearn Hospital and associated grounds.
“With the hospital having closed in the 1970s, the site has become rundown and derelict so this presents a rare opportunity to achieve something truly transformative that will give the site a new identity.
“The development will provide much-needed housing options for the local community as well as buyers from further afield.”
The brownfield site, one of the largest in the Stirling area and once used as a filming location for STV crime drama Taggart, has been considered an eyesore by many for decades.
Killearn Hospital, built during World War II to house bombing casualties and injured servicemen away from the bomb-targeted settlements of Glasgow and Clydebank, later catered for orthopaedic and neurosurgical treatments but was closed and abandoned in the 1970s.
Several schemes from various developers have been outlined for the site in the past, although none appear to have been deemed financially viable due to the prohibitive costs of clearing asbestos and contamination.
In 2017, however, potential for future housing on the site was left on the Local Development Plan by the Scottish Government’s planning reporter who said ideally it should be designated for around 70 residential units but that “a balance must be struck” given the cost of remediation.
In January the council’s planning panel heard that plans to develop the hospital site would be carried out in two separate phases to hasten the transformation of the long-term derelict land.
Cala were originally granted permission for 89 houses on the site in 2020, with planning conditions requiring remediation work be carried out on the entire site before the start of construction. However in January the panel approved Cala’s application to vary the conditions meaning the residential element could be completed in a first phase and remediation works on the non-residential site at a later date.
