Secret buyer snaps up Cov’s mystery house

THOUSANDS of people drive past it every day, and yet, it remains as one of Coventry’s mysteries.

Located near to Coventry Airport is Tollbar Island, a major traffic network which cost £106m when it reopened in 2017.

But overlooking the sprawling two-lane carriageway and underpass link is an old, seemingly abandoned house.

With vegetation slowly growing up over the walls, as if slowly consuming the building, it looks like any other forgotten about house.

But unlike many abandoned properties, this is not hidden out of site to decline.

Instead, it sits almost proudly, as motorists drive past, either into Coventry itself, or outbound towards Ryton, Rugby and beyond.

According to planning records, the house itself is 552 London Road, though it sits far away from any other properties.

The closest is the neighbouring Listers Honda Garage, sitting at 540 London Road.

But such are the changes surrounding that part of the city, it appears the only way in to access the mystery house is through the garage’s land.

Unfortunately, they did not return a request for information on their neighbours.

Strangely, planning documents show records for a 550 London Road, a semi-detached cottage beside our mystery house.

In early 2015, planning permission was granted to demolish this semidetached property, changing the land’s use from residential to storage space for motor vehicles.

With its semi-detached neighbour demolished, the Tollbar house truly became an island overlooking an island.

Historically, very little is known about the house before now.

Even looking back on historic planning records, there is just one mention of the house.

In March 1978, planning permission was granted to build a bedroom extension, with the applicant being named as a Mr B G Tomlin.

These records exists via scanned copies of handwritten documents, rather than the digital planning records that exist today.

As such, there is no way of finding out more from this. Our next step was conducting a Land Registry search.

This can supply information about a property, for the cost of £3.

Information can include the owner of a property, the price paid for the property and more.

Unfortunately, there was no price or any indications of value for 552 London Road, but it did offer up an owner - or so it appeared.

Since August 25 2015, it has been owned by the Highways England Company.

It is believed that they bought this around the time of the Tollbar Island regeneration works.

The £106 million improvement scheme looked to create freeflowing traffic which would reduce the volume of traffic using the roundabout, by providing a two lane dual carriageway underpass link.

We contacted Highways England, to find out what they have planned for the site now that the Tollbar Island works are at an end.

It turns out, the plan involved selling the land.

In a further blow, Highways England revealed that they are unable to reveal who they sold the land to.

Returning to the Land Registry, we asked why the records have yet to be updated.

A Land Registry spokesperson said: “There’s a couple of reasons Highways England are still listed as the owner.

“Firstly, it would depend on if an application for registration has been submitted to HMLR. Normally there is a gap of around 3-8 week period from the completion of the sale to when an application to change the register is submitted. This delay is due to the