Magnificent Mill, Railway & River

Flint Mill, Whinns Lane, Thorp Arch, Wetherby, West Yorkshire, LS23 7AL.

Wow – A magnificent riverside estate with 67 acres in an enchanting woodland setting, with a renovated mill home, spectacular 13,000 sq ft vintage car museum, fabulous indoor pool, two luxurious guest/staff cottages and 4,600 sq ft agricultural building. Miniature railway and floodlit weir. Riparian rights.

£4,500,000 – for sale since February 2013.

Possibly time for a bit of bargaining on the price.

Lots of interesting photos in this online brochure …

http://www.alltheagents.co.uk/for-sale/details/27968421

If we were going to pick a unique property with the advantage of being able to run a unique living from space within the complex, this would be in our all-time top ten. Just take a look at the agency photographs. What a wonderful place.

Tel – Beadnall & Copley: 01937 534031

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Bargain Bingo

The Royal Bingo Hall, St Mary’s Street, Haverfordwest, SA61 2DR.

Originally priced at £180,000, then reduced for auction. This wonderful building is now an FTSAA – Failed To Sell At Auction. Guided at £75,000 with a selection of pre-auction pictures for your edification. Take a visual wander around the interior photographs and imagine what you could do with this if and when you obtained planning permission to convert into a very unique home…

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-for-sale/property-37152359.html

Guide: £75,000 – FTSAA Looking Flexible.

Current Online Sale Information …

http://auctioneertemplates.eigroup.co.uk/LotDetails.aspx?LotID=723083&a=147&c=see

Tel- Steel & Co., Auctioneers: 02920 370 117

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New Format Unique Property Bulletin

A Photograph of Each Property;

An Address;

A Price;

A Weblink;

A Telephone Number.

Gone will be the long agency description. This is redundant, as the weblinks will have it. We did include descriptions in case weblinks and destination webpages became broken or were taken offline by the forward linked estate agency website. However, the wonderful:

Way Back When Machine

…an internet archive facility cures that worry of lost information.

This will free up the limited volunteer research time to locate more unusual properties, and especially add the a new Editorial – Unique Edge section.

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Great Gatehouse

The Gatehouse, Catherine House Lane, Wainstalls, Halifax, HX2 6XB

This impressive building looks more like a castle than a gatehouse. Please click the link below for further details of this unique building.

Guide: £465,000.

Gatehouse Online Brochure -Click Here

Tel – Anthony J. Turner Agencies: 01422 846770.

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An Island School Building

Newton School, Bridgend, Isle of Islay, Argyll, PA44 7PD

Former primary school with significant development potential.

Guide: £95,000.

http://www.ckdgalbraith.co.uk/property/PER130262/Bridgend

Tel – CKD Galbraith: 01738 451111

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Mr G. Marshall, would you like to get in touch please?

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F5 Protocol

IMPORTANT

For those readers, like us, that don’t yet have a thorough knack of the internet, please use the F5 Button. Why? This refreshes the content for any website page you are on. Particularly if that is a dynamic webpage with changing content. Your computer “caches” or stores the page automatically in it’s temporary filing system so when you revisit it, the system doesn’t have to download the whole thing again from the hosting website. The one drawback is if that website has news or useful updates. Sometimes you might miss these until your computer flushes it’s cache. Yup, we aren’t too sure what that means either!

To ensure you don’t miss anything, start using the F5 Button on your keyboard every now and then. It flushes your cache don’t you know 🙂

The F5 Button is located at the top row of your keyboard.

Hopefully, like us, something new is learned every day.

We know some things in life we would like to F5

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Special Article – 12 Churches List

St. Georges United Reformed Church & House (c) 2014 Bill Henderson

A Unique Property & A Home – Guide: £150,000.

Just one of 12 churches for sale.

This week we have a Special Article Feature listing 12 churches for sale. This is an added extra for those readers who like this genre of unusual building. There is a modest £1.56 donation to access this extra list of 12 churches for sale. The modest donation significantly helps towards our fundraising, and pays for this website’s hosting and IT fees. These donations also keeps the main Sunday night, 9pm Unique Property Bulletin FREE to access for everyone. To access this spiritual abode list, please click the following Donate Button – with our thanks and appreciation ….

 

It is important to note, the Donate/Paypal system doesn’t let you back into the 12 Churches Special Article webpage for a second look – or as many visits as you wish for the currency of the article [two months]. The good news is you can revisit this webpage by clicking here:

Special Article Feature: Return Visit Page – Click Here

Please remember the PASSWORD that your Donation Reply gives you.

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Barns With Plans　

Queens Farm Barns, Queens Farm Road, Shorne, Gravesend, Kent, DA12 3HU

Guide: £140,000 to £150,000　

Situated to the east of Gravesend within Shorne Village and occupying a plot of 0.88 acres (0.35 hectares) are these former farm buildings with barn for conversion, cart shed, livestock pens/buildings and granary.

Planning Permission has been granted by Gravesham Borough Council, under ref: 20110248, dated 10th February 2012, for conversion of the former agricultural buildings to form two residential dwellings together with ancillary workspace, garaging, storage, car parking spaces, new access track and landscaping, subject to conditions

http://www.cliveemson.co.uk/listing_view.asp?Lot=60&Auc=169

Tel – Clive Emson Auction House: 0845 8500333

Always remember our FTSAA Principle – Failed To Sell At Auction. Well worth a follow up call post-auction to see what happened.

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Old Watermill, Wheel & Home

The Old Mill, Acharn, Aberfeldy, Perthshire, PH15 2HS

£395,000　

http://search.savills.com/property-detail/gbperspes130029　

Tel – Savils: 01738 477525 – Mr Carl Warden or Moira Webley

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Unique Property Competition

For this month, the Unique Property Bulletin competition prize is a lucky…

Crisp Nostalgic & Lucky £1 Note – Unique Property Bulletin Prize

This is a very modest prize – for fun. Here is the…

Competition Hint

On every Bulletin page you can see the first name starting D****** . This month’s competition is what is the surname of the 20th century American president with this first name?

Free to enter. Just let us know your guess of who you think the above Competition Hint refers to? Please email your entry to us by 30th April 2014. Email free entries to:-

Unique Property Bulletin Competition Entry Contact Page

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FTSAA

Former Chapel, Chapel Road, Prestwich, Manchester, M25 9SS

FTSAA = Failed To Sell At Auction 24th April 2014.

This is now into bargain territory. Worth a look?

Pre-FTSAA Guide £70,000

http://www.pugh-auctions.com/Lot/Manchester/20140424/037a

Tel – Pugh Auctioneers: 0844 2 722444

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Architecturally Unique …

The Orb

　　The Orb, Wherever, Whenever & However You Would Like.

The Orb is a contemporary, architect designed home office or studio. You just need to supply an appropriate piece of garden or land with requisite planning consents. Then get in touch with the firm of David Miller Architects for details.

http://www.david-miller.co.uk/contact.php

Tel – David Miller Architects: 020 7636 4318

http://www.david-miller.co.uk/what-we-do/special-projects.php

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Try Before You Buy …..

The property included within the try-before-you-buy section of the Unique Property Bulletin – is NOT for sale. Our endeavour is to provide a sample, and actual experience of what it would be like to live in any particular genre of unusual abode. This specific listing is for a short-stay break. Our offering this week is:

 

Something For The Weekend

A Brief Encounter

　

　The Old Station, Allerston, Pickering, North Yorkshire, YO18 7PG

Prices…

http://www.theoldstationallerston.co.uk/prices-availability-and-booking-form

If you hanker for this style of unique life you might like to dwell on the occupancy rates. Very impressive.

http://www.theoldstationallerston.co.uk/

Tel : 01723 859 024

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Unique Property Bulletin …

Editorial – Unique Edge

 Unique People – Unique Places

Unique – But What, Where, When (c) Chris NMRD

This is the editorial originally scheduled for last week. That was before we had a fleet of emails asking about Unique Property Syndicates [lower page editorial].

Hopefully the questions about that topic were answered. Apologies if it wasn’t as polished as perhaps it should have been, but the long term L5/S1 were playing up to an awful degree – the weblink from Annette, who is a fellow member of that club illustrates the problem in a way that words can’t! From this end the recurrent L5/S1 pain was self inflicted. Couldn’t resist fun on a bus and overdid it a bit. All for the good though – in aid of getting the Unique Property Bulletin Bus on the road. So as to visit with unique people at their unique properties. More of the bus project to be reported here in a few weeks.

For this Bulletin we have a unique person who telephoned. Aidrian. I will spare any embarrassment by not naming this unique property person fully, but he got it. The unique property bug. Like many who have a heart for an unusual place to live.

For me it isn’t just the unique properties, but genuinely a great delight in meeting/talking with like-minded people who share the same passion about unusual places to call home. Adrian and I had a telephone chat that was an enjoyable one hour plus. A wide range of things discussed – including the aforementioned Unique Property Bulletin Bus adventure.

But one item – a unique style of home that Adrian highlighted during the conversation was remarkable. In 25 years with this Unique Property Bulletin I have never considered these types of structure. Having worked in a place that has very close links with a particular home of these forms of unique property it is unusual not to have considered them before. Thanks to Adrian they are now on the old radar. The genre? Submarine Pens…　

An Example: The St Nazaire Submarine Pens (c) Ka Teznik

At first sight, not what you might want to look at as an unusual home.

Submarine Pens: Dark, Dank, Raw & Unlit (c) Rama

Truth be told, this is an extremely sensitive area, even 70 years after the end of World War II. So many lives lost. Sailors, civilians – all for what?　

U-Boat 110 (c) Royal Navy Photograph

Government Copyright PSI Licence C2010002126

Those who fought in that World War are getting fewer as the years between 1939-1945 and present day grow further away. Those not fallen in war are becoming lost over time. Even for youngsters of a certain, more recent generation, born just after the war. The 1950’s and 1960’s generation, was a time when many grew up at school where the war was still a very raw subject. The second World War affected millions of young minds. Nowadays it is Playstations, Nintendo Wii, Kindle – thank goodness. But in the 1960’s the sons and daughters of those who served had pictures of warplanes and battleships – even submarines – drawn at school and brought home for mum and dad to put on the fridge. Many had parents who simply wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about such subjects. The imprint of these things last. A different lifetime away. Even as an adult, and having, as an aposite example, had the privilege of being aboard HMS Campbeltown [F86] the echoes of what went before are still remembered. Rightly so. The captain and crew of this modern day frigate were well aware of the previous bearer of that ship name. For it was HMS Campbeltown [I42]/USS Buchanan that rammed the gates of the Forme Ecluse Louis Joubert dry dock at St Nazaire. HMS Campbeltown exploded the following morning, ending the use of the dock and lethal submarine pens for the rest of the war. In the St Nazaire action, hundreds died. It is a measure of the dedication to duty that five Victoria crosses were awarded for the operation at St Nazaire.

HMS Campbeltown Ended St Nazaire U-Boat Yard For The Rest Of WWII

Adrian mentioned a unique property opposite a home he had lived at for some years. It was, to the untrained eye, very interesting, and to the unique property person a potentially wonderful place to live. Especially if you have a love of ships, or an abiding wish to live by the ocean.

Very Interesting Submarine Pen Near Montenegro (c) Andrey Sulitskiy

The exterior boundary is now encrusted with a green grassy piece of land, atop a turquoise pure sea. The thunderous original occupants long gone, with just a the whisper of an old war fortification remaining. The potential to make this a unique home is obvious. Just look at the pictures …

Montage of Photographs – Submarine Pen Near Montenegro

The imagination could run wild. There was a great deal of excitement regarding this genre of unusual property here at the Bulletin for a while following our friend Adrian’s telephone call. However as the days went by, and the history came through via research in such large volumes – over 700 of these World War II U-Boat submarines housed in such shoreside structures when on crew leave, or maintenance and repair – the feelings towards these submarine pens changed.

World War II U-Boat U156 Under Fire

Innumerable tragedies stood out from studying the potential and history surrounding submarine pens. After all this time the words of a survivor of one particular U-Boat attack carry a powerful literal punch.

An unusual perspective – the account of actions by Commander Werner Hartenstein, the German submariner who put his own life and the lives of his U-boat crew at risk to save hundreds of passengers on board the RMS Laconia, a requisitioned cruise liner armed and bound for Britain, which had been torpedoed on Hartenstein’s orders 600 miles off the coast of west Africa. Please remember the context of a raging World War that this quotation is from.

“No U-boat captain who would sit on the surface all that time and risk his own life is a bad man,” said Commander Geoffrey Greet, an English survivor of the Laconia, recalling the events of 1942 this weekend. “I didn’t think much of him at first – after all, he had killed 2,000 of my fellow passengers. But by the end, I admired him.”

　German Commander Hartenstein Praised By British Commander Greet

An extraordinarily brave thing for British Commander Greet to say. Especially as he had been one of those torpedoed by Commaner Hartenstein’s submarine.

U-Boat Commander Werner Hartenstein risked his life and that of his crew to save hundreds of passengers on board the RMS Laconia and what was to become retold as the Laconia Incident. The tragedy is more particularly narrated here with the commanders of the Kriegsmarine being given the infamous resultant Laconia Order issued by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Remarkably, Großadmiral Dönitz was later to succeed as Head of State in Germany on 1st May 1945.

In amongst all of this human suffering, the respect shown towards U-Boat Commander Werner Hartenstein by U-Boat & RMS Laconia survivor Commander Geoffrey Greet says the very best of the very worst of situations.

After studying all of this history that can be found, in a way submerged below the waves of these submarine pens, the idea of living in one of these converted structures is perhaps a little too sensitive to consider progressing. Proper regard for those who have paid a very high price allows no room for further action on our part.

This documentary put the lid on any further thoughts of waterside bunker home…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s

Better to leave these old submarine pens to fade away as dissolving memorials to what was a time when the world came close to Armageddon.

It is an evocative subject. Something that looks so enticing. A place where you could live, safe, with the easiest access to water and a boat afloat shining from a bright lit photograph. But history soon comes back to life. With so much history and devastation it would be the height of disrespect to consider anything for these structures other than a memorial function.

C’est la vie, c’est la guerre

A French Vessel: Espadon – Submarine Pen Museum Piece (c) Rama

So for now, our quest to find a place that results in living on, by, in or even underneath the water continues. Perhaps that is why we have such an keen appetite for lighthouses. Beacons that have the function to warn passing ships of danger and to keep crews and passengers safe. On that count, former submarine pens, whilst they have a certain attraction, are a definite no no.

One thing for sure. The fact that such an odyssey, even just on paper, can come about and be studied in detail after a conversation with a unique friend makes it worthwhile to keep this website going.

Unique People – Unique Places.

Works for us.

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Previously on Unique Property Bulletin …

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