Hackney Council to sell off seven-bedroom mansion it bought in 2015 for troubled families scheme

Hackney Town Hall

A countryside mansion that was home to a respite centre for troubled families is set to be sold off by Hackney Council.

The Town Hall believes the seven-bedroom Silver Trees mansion in south London’s Kennington could fetch £2m.

The council bought the home, originally built for an Oxford University don, for a reported £1.2m in 2015.

Up to three families at a time lived in the house alongside support staff who offered counselling.

Hackney received a £2m government funding to run a project but bought the home with its own funds.

Its agent looked at a “large number of properties” across south-east England before picking Silver Trees.

The mansion was closed in March 2020 because of the pandemic and has not reopened.

At a meeting for nearby residents in Kennington in 2015, the council said it would “most likely” put the home back on the market if it chose to close the centre.

It told concerned locals that families would be supported by staff and that children would “be supervised by parents and professional staff at all times”.

A Town Hall report said it had been beset by “operational difficulties”.

In 2016, residents living nearby objected to plans for “excessively high fencing and CCTV”.

Kennington parish council questioned the need for this level of security “if it as innocuous as we are led to believe”.

The council later dropped requests for the fencing and CCTV at the house on the edge of woodland owned by an Oxford College.

Colin Charlett, who chairs Kennington parish council, told the Citizen: “So far as the parish council is concerned we have not been aware of any problems.”

He added: “We have had no complaints from neighbouring residents.”

He recalled a pre-pandemic visit and said: “They must have spent quite a lot of money on the place. We were shown round, it was really nice inside, clean and tidy. They had even put in a tree house.”

Cllr Anntoinette Bramble, cabinet member for children’s social care, said: “Hackney Council will be selling Silver Trees, which closed in March 2020 due to national lockdown, in the coming months.

“The funding to support the service will be redirected into offering high-quality, tailored help and support to children and their families within the borough, and into other children’s social care services, to prevent children entering into the care system, as well as to help children return to the family home after a period of time in care.

“Eighty-six families have been helped through the programme delivered at Silver Trees, since it started in 2016, with many successful interventions, including supporting children to return home from foster care or from residential homes into foster care.

“Over time, we faced a number of challenges with the Silver Trees building and its location, which were exacerbated by the pandemic, including: identifying enough suitable families for this type of residential intervention; and restrictive planning policies, which placed a limit on the number of people allowed on site.”

Update: this article was amended at 12.47pm on 15 September 2022 to add in a comment from Cllr Anntoinette Bramble.