Hythe Imperial Hotel, GSE Group and the Healey–Bowles Empire: Inside Kent’s Construction, Property and Truckstop Network. A Shepway Vox Investigation

When you walk along Hythe seafront, the Hythe Imperial Hotel & Spa looms over the promenade – a refurbished Victorian pile now marketed as a luxury coastal retreat. What most visitors don’t see is the web of construction and property companies behind it, stretching from seafront apartments and country-house hotels to truckstops and industrial estates along the M20 corridor.

At the centre of that web sits a quiet holding company with an unglamorous name: GSE C & H Holdings Limited, whose accounts we have examined.

A New Top-Co For An Old Business

GSE C & H Holdings was born in February 2020 as Henwood Forty Two Limited, registered at Henwood House in Ashford. Within weeks it had a new name and a transformative deal: on 4 April 2020 it acquired GSE Building & Civil Engineering Ltd and GSE Plant Ltd for £2.3 million, giving it control of the group’s core civil engineering and plant hire operations. 

The owners are two familiar names in the Kent construction scene. The incorporation documents and the current Companies House register agree: the persons of significant control are Joshua Marcus Healey (below left) and Anthony James (Tony) Bowles (below centre), each holding more than 25% but not more than 50% of the shares. 

Joshua Healey is the son of Darrell Healey (above right), the Ashford entrepreneur who built the original GSE Group from the mid-1980s and still chairs the wider business. Tony Bowles, who joined the firm as a groundworker in 2000, worked his way up to Managing Director. In July 2020, the pair led a management buy-out, buying Darrell’s shares while he stepped back into a non-executive role.

If GSE C & H is the new top-co, the wider group remains firmly a family affair.

Hotels, Homes And Truckstops

Public filings show the trio – Darrell, Joshua and Tony – spread across a dense network of companies. For Joshua, Companies House lists more than a dozen current directorships, including GSE Construction (Group), GSE Building & Civil Engineering, GSE C & H Holdings, GSE Property Group, Ashford International Truck Stop, GSE Waterbrook, GSE Cheriton Parc, GSE Truckstop Developments and a string of residential SPVs such as Southcliff Developments, GSE Broadstairs, GSE Cranbrook, Millstone Meadow and Jakob James Designer Homes.

That influence also spills into civic life. Joshua Healey is publicly associated with Folkestone Invicta, ultimately owned by Addington Leisure Ltd, where he appears in club communications as Chairman and is recorded in the club’s corporate filing ecosystem as a key individual (including PSC-related filings).

Darrell Healey, meanwhile, remains a director or former director of many of the older holding and investment entities – GSE Developments, GSE Investments, the truckstop holding companies and the Imperial Green management companies linked to the apartment complexes beside the Hythe Imperial.

Tony Bowles appears as director and co-owner of GSE Holdings (Kent), GSE Plant, GSE’s new property group and various housing SPVs.

Together, these entities control an asset portfolio which includes:

The Hythe Imperial Hotel & Spa, operated in the GSE sphere (with public documentation linking the hotel to GSE Cheriton Parc Limited and ultimately owned by GSE Cheriton Parc (Holdings) Ltd and controlled by Darrell Healey and his wife) and recently refinanced with a £6m facility, secured against the hotel.

The Hotel grounds is where GSE Cheriton Parc (Holdings) Ltd desire to add 291 homes on the golf course next to the Imperial Hotel and Royal Military Canal.

Cottages and leisure assets under the Marquis Hotel Group and Marquis Accommodation banners.

Major logistics and truckstop schemes along the M20, notably at Ashford International Truck Stop and Waterbrook, plus mixed-use developments at Cheriton Parc near Folkestone.

It is a classic modern property-construction structure: operating companies at the front line, ring-fenced SPVs for each big site, and a holding company – GSE C & H – knitting the key construction businesses together.

And the land story keeps returning. The latest 291-home proposal on Hythe’s golf course is not a one-off: it is publicly reported as a second attempt to develop the site, after a previous concept (holiday-chalet style development) was dropped and replaced by the new, housing-heavy plan.

The Numbers: Solid But Heavily Entangled

On paper, the accounts of GSE C & H Holdings look reassuring. Since 2020 the group has posted profit every year, with turnover climbing from about £14m to just over £21m in 2024, and net assets rising to £1.66m. 

The business has moved from a net overdraft to more than £2.2m of cash at bank, helped by strong operating cash flows in 2023 and 2024.

But beneath those headline figures are some less comfortable truths.

First, margins are tight and getting tighter. Gross margins peaked at just over 19% in 2021 before slipping back into the mid-teens in 2023 and 2024. In a sector prone to cost overruns and disputes, that leaves very little room for error. 

Second, the group is deeply intertwined with other Healey-family companies. In 2020, more than half of turnover came from companies controlled by a close family member of Joshua Healey, leaving GSE owed over £5m by these related parties. Even by 2024 the group still recorded £1.8m of annual sales and £3.8m of year-end receivables from them, all interest-free and technically “repayable on demand”. 

Third, the entire structure rests on a slab of related-party debt. The accounts disclose that GSE owes around £2.4m to The Darrell Healey SIPP, the self-invested pension of the group’s founder, and another £2.3m to a related company – long-term, interest-free but ultimately repayable. Against net assets of £1.66m, the group is clearly leveraged to its insiders. 

In simple terms: if Darrell Healey’s pension fund or the connected company ever called in their money, or if the web of related companies stopped paying their bills, GSE C & H’s apparently healthy balance sheet would look far more fragile.

There is also a more prosaic risk that doesn’t fit into glossy brochures: working capital strain. In 2024 the group carried £12.25m of debtors and £11.61m of creditors due within one year—big numbers in a low-margin business where timing (when you get paid versus when you must pay) can decide whether a year ends in comfort or panic. The same year includes material “amounts recoverable on contracts” (a judgment-heavy construction area, because it depends on assessments of progress and recoverability). 

And while the cash position improved sharply by 2024, it followed years where cash equivalents were effectively negative once bank overdrafts were included—meaning resilience was, at times, thinner than the headline profits implied.

One further tell: even with that historic tightness, dividends were consistently paid out to shareholders across the period, including £222,000 in 2024. In a contractor where cash is oxygen, dividend policy is never just a footnote—it is a decision about how much slack you leave in the system.

Quiet Boosts From Government And Accounting

The profits themselves are partly lifted by factors that have nothing to do with pouring concrete or laying tarmac.

In the pandemic years, the group recognised six-figure government grants as “other operating income”, cushioning it against Covid disruption. And because GSE C & H acquired its main subsidiaries at a bargain price in 2020, the deal generated a large negative goodwill balance – the accounting equivalent of buying £1 of assets for 70p. That negative goodwill is amortised over time as a non-cash credit, again appearing in operating profit.

None of this is improper; it is exactly how the accounting rules work. But it means that the group’s headline profits are not pure trading profits: they embed government support and paper gains from a bargain purchase.

A Family Empire With Public Stakes

One thing that does not appear, despite some public suspicion around offshore structures in UK property, is evidence of the Healeys or Bowles featuring in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks or OCCRP databases. Searches across those public datasets show no obvious matches for their names.

That in itself may come as some comfort to local residents concerned about who really owns prominent Kent assets. The story here is not of Caribbean shell companies and anonymous trusts, but of a tightly held, family-run group using every inch of UK company and pension law to finance an expanding portfolio.

The longer view of the group’s founder is also part of the public record. Reporting has linked Darrell Healey (described as chairman of GSE Group) to a High Court dispute connected to a superyacht contract, and separate tax commentary has discussed a case in his name concerning UK residence. Neither point proves wrongdoing in today’s accounts—but both underline that this is a world where high-value deals, complex arrangements and high-stakes disputes are not unfamiliar terrain.

For councils and communities, though, the stakes are still high. The same network that owns the Hythe Imperial, Imperial Green and large chunks of the truck-stop economy also bids for, wins and delivers major civil engineering contracts across the region – with the public ultimately paying for the roads, roundabouts and infrastructure that support those private schemes.

The GSE accounts show a group that is profitable, ambitious and deeply embedded in Kent’s built environment. They also show a group heavily dependent on the goodwill and solvency of related parties, and on the continued forbearance of a founder’s pension fund.

For a seaside town looking up at a grand hotel and a council weighing the next planning application, those are numbers worth keeping firmly in view.

The Shepway Vox Team

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