No community group has told Brighton and Hove City Council in writing that it wants to bid for the Montreal Arms, the former pub at 62 Albion Hill in Hanover, after a six-week window for community bids closed on Tuesday 3 November 2026.
The council confirmed the position to ImJustBrighton on Thursday 5 November 2026. The window opened on 23 September 2026, the day the council received the owner’s notice of intent to sell. The building stays on the council’s Asset of Community Value register until 12 May 2027, or until it is sold if that happens first.
ImJustBrighton emailed the council’s press office on 4 November 2026 with five questions about the sale, the listing and the building. The council replied on Thursday 5 November. The questions and the answers are set out word for word below, followed by what the rules mean and how the Montreal Arms got here.
Why ImJustBrighton asked the council
The Montreal Arms is on the market with a guide price of offers in excess of £425,000. It is also on the council’s register of Assets of Community Value, which gives community groups a short window to say they want to bid before an owner sells. With a locally listed, green-tiled building, a long enforcement history and a sale window about to close, ImJustBrighton asked the council directly whether any group had come forward, what dates applied and what the council now thinks of the building.
The five questions and the council’s answers
Each question below is shown as ImJustBrighton sent it. Each answer is the council’s own wording from its reply to ImJustBrighton on Thursday 5 November 2026.
1. Has the council received a notice of intent to sell from the owner, and on what date?
“The council received a notice of intent to sell from the owner on 23/09/2026.”
2. When did the initial six-week window for community interest groups to say they want to bid begin and end?
“The initial six-week window for community interest groups to say they want to bid began on 23/09/2026 and ended on 03/11/2026.”
3. Has any eligible community group told the council in writing that it wants to bid? If so, does the six-month moratorium now apply, and until when?
“No eligible community groups have told the council in writing that it wants to bid.”
ImJustBrighton note. The reply did not say anything separate about the six-month moratorium. Under the Localism Act that pause only applies if a community group asks in writing during the first six weeks, which the council says did not happen.
4. When does the Asset of Community Value listing end, and does it end on sale?
“The Asset of Community Value listing will end on 12/05/27. If sold, in accordance with the statutory provisions prior to that date, it will be removed from the Register.”
5. What is the council’s current position on the building, including the planning permission and the listed-building and enforcement history?
“The council is not in a position to further comment on the building, including the planning permission and the listed-building and enforcement history.”
ImJustBrighton note. The council gave no position on the building. Its planning decisions, appeal outcomes and court rulings are public, and its own heritage record for the building is the Local List entry (reference LLHA0003). All of it is set out below.
What this means for the pub’s future
Being listed as an Asset of Community Value does not stop a sale and does not freeze a building. It gives local groups a chance to prepare an offer before an owner sells on the open market.
Under section 95 of the Localism Act 2011, an owner of a listed asset has to tell the council when it wants to sell. A six-week interim period then starts from the date the council receives the notice. If a community interest group asks in writing during those six weeks to be treated as a potential bidder, a full pause of six months from the same date applies. If no group does, the owner can sell to anyone, as long as it does so within a protected period of 18 months from that date.
Counting 18 months from 23 September 2026 puts the end of that protected period around March 2028. That date is ImJustBrighton’s own calculation from the wording of the Act, not a date the council has given.
The council has said before that listing can matter when a building’s use is up for change. Announcing the outcome of a tribunal case in November 2023, it said an Asset of Community Value listing may be a material consideration where a new development proposes changing the use.
A green-tiled pub on the corner of Albion Hill
The Montreal Arms stands at the junction of Albion Hill and Montreal Road. The council added it to its list of buildings of local historic interest in 2015 (reference LLHA0003). The entry describes a two-storey corner pub with tiled ground-floor elevations, rendered first-floor walls, a tiled hipped roof with deep eaves and a pub sign set into the canted corner above the main entrance.
The council lists four reasons for the listing: a good example of a regional approach to pub frontage design, a tiled front that reflects the local United Breweries company’s style, a strong contribution to the street scene, and a building that has kept its design integrity despite replacement windows. The fascia still reads “United” Ales and Stout, a reference to Portsmouth & Brighton United Breweries, formed in 1927.
The Brewery History Society records the building as a former Chapman & Co house that passed to Rock Brewery (Brighton) Ltd, before the United company rebuilt the frontage in its typical style after taking over Rock.
A First-tier Tribunal judge later found that the pub traded for nearly 140 years, mostly without interruption, until it closed in early 2020. It never had a kitchen.
A floor plan produced for the pub agent Fleurets measures the building at 2,648 square feet (246 square metres) in total. The ground floor, at 1,232 square feet, holds the bar, toilets, a store and a courtyard with a covered area. The first floor, at 840 square feet, is a three-bedroom flat with a lounge and kitchen. A basement of 515 square feet holds two cellars and a store.
How it came to be on the register
A local group called Friends of the Montreal Arms nominated the pub as an Asset of Community Value on 1 April 2022. The owner’s director objected on 20 April 2022, and the council listed the building on 13 May 2022. A review requested by the owner upheld the listing.
The owner then appealed to the First-tier Tribunal. After a remote hearing on 26 July 2023, Judge Neville dismissed the appeal in a decision given on 6 November 2023. The judge found that the pub had furthered the social wellbeing of the local community in the recent past, because it had only closed in early 2020. On the future, the judge accepted that the prospects of any use within five years were slim, but wrote that “it is still realistic to think that it could”.
The council announced the outcome on 13 November 2023. Councillor Birgit Miller, then lead councillor for culture, said the ruling gave “further protection to this well loved and historic building”.
The tiles, the enforcement notice and the planning permission
Photographs taken on 12 August 2023 show large patches of the green glazed tiles missing from the ground floor, with plaster and brickwork showing underneath, ground-floor windows and doors boarded up, graffiti on the remaining tiles and cracked, patched render on the first floor. Photographs of the same corner from 2015 and 2019 show the frontage with its tiles in place. The pictures are by the Wikimedia Commons photographer Hassocks5489 and are released free of copyright. The circles and numbers are ImJustBrighton’s. The most recent freely licensed photographs ImJustBrighton found date from August 2023, so they show the building as it was then, not necessarily as it is today.
Some of the green glazed tiles were taken off the ground floor in March 2022, after Dragonfly Architectural Services Ltd bought the building. The council served a temporary stop notice on 30 March 2022 and an enforcement notice on 20 April 2022. The notice told the owner to stop removing tiles and to reinstate those that had been removed or damaged.
The owner appealed. A Planning Inspector upheld the notice, with minor changes, on 17 July 2023, giving the owner 12 months to comply.
In June 2024 the council’s Planning Committee approved a renovation of the building (application BH2024/00507). The scheme was amended during the process to keep the pub use and its ancillary accommodation. It includes ground-floor and first-floor extensions, new windows and doors, and roof alterations that raise the ridge height. Permission came with 16 conditions, including council approval of samples of the render, roof tiling and glazed tiles before work starts, and detailed plans for the tiles to be replaced or repaired. The council also reminded the applicant that planning permission does not replace the need for a licence under the Licensing Act 2003.
A second application, to turn the pub into a commercial unit with a first-floor flat, was refused by council officers in May 2024. The council’s appeals lists show that appeals against both decisions were withdrawn in the weeks to 17 September 2024.
The tiles were back in front of a Planning Inspector in 2025. The owner appealed after the council did not decide, within the time allowed, on the details required by five conditions of the 2024 permission. On 17 November 2025 the Inspector allowed the appeal.
The owner’s building engineer had told the council that the building’s “bungaroosh” construction, a traditional Brighton mix of rubble and lime, and its state of disrepair could mean large sections of wall would need rebuilding. The approved method is to record every tile on the facade, remove them, store them and then put them back in their original positions alongside replica tiles for any that are lost or cannot be reused.
The Inspector accepted that taking all the tiles off would cause some harm to the building’s significance, describing it as a “very small degree of harm”, and judged that securing the building’s long-term future outweighed it. In a separate costs decision the same day, the Inspector ordered the council to pay the owner’s costs of preparing the appeal, saying the council had not clearly explained why it considered the owner’s information inadequate.
A further appeal over changes to the tile conditions was also allowed. The council’s appeal decisions list for 18 February to 17 March 2026 records it as allowed.
One appeal is still without a recorded outcome. Appeal APL2026/00001 was received on 15 January 2026 and relates to application BH2025/02419, a request for a certificate of lawfulness. The application asks for confirmation that, under section 180 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, the enforcement notice upheld on appeal has ceased to have effect where it is inconsistent with the 2024 planning permission, and that carrying out the works that permission allows would therefore be lawful. The council’s latest published appeal decisions list, which runs to 21 July 2026, does not record a decision on it.
The prosecution that ended in February
The council also took the owner to court over the enforcement notice. It asked magistrates for a summons on 15 May 2025, and the case went to Lewes Crown Court, where the owner’s company and its director, Charlie Southall, each faced one charge of failing to comply with an enforcement notice.
On 23 February 2026 the council told the court that it was no longer in the public interest to go on. On 27 February 2026 it offered no evidence, and not guilty verdicts were entered for both defendants.
In a written ruling on costs dated 10 July 2026, the judge, His Honour Judge van der Zwart, ordered the council to pay £11,475.60 towards Mr Southall’s costs, out of £20,268.60 claimed. He did not allow the part of the claim for Mr Southall’s own time as a litigant in person.
The judge said the correspondence showed an owner keen to work with the council on the state of the building rather than ignore the enforcement notice. He concluded that the decision to prosecute was “starkly improper” and one that no reasonable prosecutor could or should have made. He said the decisions to bring and continue the case had to do with deflecting criticism over the community not being given a chance to buy the pub under the Asset of Community Value scheme, and with appeasing public pressure. He added that he did not single out any individual member of council staff for blame.
The council told ImJustBrighton that it is not in a position to comment further on the building, including its enforcement history.
Where the Montreal Arms is and what happens next
The six-week window has closed with no written bid, so the owner is free to sell to any buyer. The listing stays in place until 12 May 2027 or until a sale, whichever comes first, and the council has said it will remove the building from the register if it is sold before then.
Planning permission goes with the land rather than the owner, so a new owner would take on the 2024 permission and its conditions, including those on the tiles. Anyone planning to reopen the building as a pub would also need a licence under the Licensing Act 2003.
The Montreal Arms timeline
The sale window closed on 3 November 2026 with no written bid, and the council says the listing runs to 12 May 2027 unless the building is sold first.
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