SPECULATION about the future of a closed restaurant in Chobham will be ended if a bid to convert it to homes succeeds.

A planning application has been made to change the ground floor of The Park in Station Road to three flats.

The Park was shut more than six years ago after operating for just over a year. 

It was the second restaurant to be run in a building that was for many years the main village newsagents.

It replaced The Green Olive, another short-lived enterprise in what was until the mid-1980s The Ridgeway paper and sweet shop and tobacconist.

A plan to convert the ground floor into three flats has been made on behalf of Evan Steffanson. He is a director of Torre Cerrano Marketing Company Ltd, which recently changed its registered office address from a London street to The Park.

The first floor of the building is already a flat so there will be four homes if the application is approved by Surrey Heath Borough Council.

Mr Steffanson’s agents, ET Planning, say the conversion to flats should be allowed under permitted development rules. The external facades will be renovated sensitively, which will not affect the appearance of the village conservation area.

The change would also not change the look of the land, which is between the locally-listed Chobham Village Hall and a Tesco supermarket, and would create less disturbance to neighbours than a restaurant would.