A FORMER Denton bank may be redeveloped after being sold at an auction.
The building on Ashton Road at Crown Point used to house the branch of RBS.
But its use may now change after it sold for £182,000 after going under the hammer.
Pugh Auctions handled the sale of the property at the AJ Bell Stadium in Salford on February 19 and it reached its reserve price.
Now the buyers will have to apply for a change of usage to Tameside Council’s planning committee if they wish to convert the three-floored building.
So far, nothing has yet been lodged with the authority.
The RBS branch in Denton closed on November 1 last year and it has remained empty since, even though it sits on the town’s major road junction.
News of the closure, soon after a nearby branch of NatWest shut its doors, did not go down well with MP Andrew Gwynne.
He said: “This is a bitter blow for the high street coming so soon after the closure of the NatWest at Crown Point, which is coincidently part of the same group.
“Given that the Government has given a £5 billion tax break to the banks, it seems that the only thing that counts these days isn’t customer service and supporting communities, but rather a return to the bad of days of putting profit ahead of people.”
The bank was one of several in Tameside to close. RBS itself shut its branch in Mossley while Stalybridge has seen Lloyds, Barclays, Yorkshire Bank, Yorkshire Building Society and Halifax Building Society disappear from its streets.
At the time of announcing the Denton closure, an RBS spokesman said: “We are no longer launching Williams & Glyn as a challenger bank and we now have two branch networks operating in close proximity to each other; NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland, in England and Wales.
“As a result, we have had to review our overall branch footprint in England and Wales and we’ve made the difficult decision to close a number of Royal Bank of Scotland branches.
“Customers of Royal Bank of Scotland in England and Wales will be able to use NatWest branches instead for their everyday banking needs.”
The Correspondent has seen documents dating back to 1894, when the building was first signed over by William Cooke Thornhill and James Thornhill to Frank Bond Biddiscombe and John Henry Lees.
Even back then, there were concerns, only over wheelbarrows rather than debit cards.
A spokesman for Pugh Auctions confirmed: “The property has now sold.”