Sefton Council has filed to demolish Toad Hall in Ainsdale for a car park. Barn owls nesting inside get a new tower first, and no work in the nesting season.
Sefton Council has formally applied to demolish Toad Hall, the former hotel and nightclub on the seafront at Ainsdale. The land would be levelled for a car park.
The council’s planning team validated the application on Tuesday 20 October. It has until Tuesday 17 November to decide. (Sefton planning portal, DC/2026/01680)
The papers also show who is living there now. A pair of barn owls nests in the building, and their chicks were heard calling this spring. They have to be rehoused before a single brick comes down.
What the council plans to do
The demolition planning statement, written for the council by surveyors Ridge and Partners, sets out the work:
- the whole of Toad Hall and its single-storey nightclub extension would be pulled down
- excavators would take it down from the top, floor by floor, working from outside, because the upper floors are unsafe to enter
- licensed contractors would first remove the asbestos, which the survey found “throughout” the building
- brick and concrete would be crushed on site and laid as the base of the future car park, which the statement says keeps lorry trips down
- the work is expected to take up to eight weeks, Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm, with no weekend or bank holiday working
Lorries would use the existing gated entrance in the hoarding off Coastal Road. The statement says dust would be damped down with water and crushing would stop in high winds.
The car park itself is not part of this application. The statement says it will be the subject of a separate full planning application “later in the autumn 2026”. The council’s ecologists describe it as a temporary car park.
Why the building is going
Toad Hall was built around 1920 as part of the Ainsdale-on-Sea development, the statement says. It has served as a hotel and a nightclub. It has stood empty for several years, with “extensive fire damage, storm damage” and evidence of break-ins. It is not in a conservation area.
The asbestos survey could not reach parts of the building at all. Surveyors were kept out by collapsed floors, flooding and heavy build-up of bird droppings.
The council’s Ainsdale regeneration questions and answers, last updated in September 2025, say Toad Hall “has been deemed structurally unsafe and beyond viable restoration”. The same page says the sand lizard mural on its walls “was always intended as an interim feature while plans progressed”.
The barn owls
The ecology report by Tyrer Ecological Consultants records barn owls breeding at Toad Hall since at least 2023. Two nest boxes were fitted into the boarded windows after that first breeding record.
On both dusk surveys in May 2026, two adult barn owls flew out of the nest box on the south-west side of the building. On the second visit, chicks could be heard calling from the box.
The report does not soften the effect of losing the building. It says Toad Hall is likely to be the pair’s only nesting site and the centre of their home range, and that the loss of a nest “should be considered highly significant”.
Its mitigation plan includes:
- a new wildlife tower for barn owls on the eastern edge of the site, closed to the public, carrying the three existing nest boxes
- a replacement nest box up at least 30 days before work starts
- a check by a licensed barn owl ecologist no more than three days before work, from a raised platform because the building is too dangerous to enter
- no work at all between 1 March and 31 August, the nesting season
The tower will also include space for bats. The May surveys recorded no bat activity, but a single common pipistrelle roosted in the building in 2023.
The dunes around it
The site sits next to the Sefton Coast dunes. The planning statement says it lies in the impact risk zone of the Sefton Coast Site of Special Scientific Interest, so Natural England must be consulted.
A botanical survey found coastal sand dune grassland on the site, which is classed as irreplaceable habitat. The bluebells there turned out to be Spanish and hybrid bluebells, not the protected native kind.
What it means for you
- This is not a vote on whether Toad Hall stays. The application is a prior notification under national permitted development rules. The planning team decides whether it needs to approve how the building comes down and how the site is left, not whether it can be demolished.
- You can still comment. The application, reference DC/2026/01680, and all its documents are on the Sefton planning portal. The decision is due by 17 November.
- Watch for the car park plan. The bigger say on what replaces the building comes with the full application for the car park, which the council expects to file later this autumn. We will report it when it is lodged. Our Southport planning news page tracks the borough’s decisions.
- No start date has been published. The ecology rules mean any demolition must fall outside March to August. If work goes ahead this winter, expect lorries and a crusher behind the hoarding off Coastal Road on weekdays.
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