Sandbanks Littlestone Development: Ownership, Planning and Company Questions

We have written about Sandbanks before. Back in 2021 the questions were about planning, ownership and who was really driving the scheme. Five years on, the former care home is back in the spotlight, and the paperwork now looks even stranger. The site has moved through different owners, different applicant names and different corporate vehicles. Some of the records fit together. Some plainly do not. The result is a development where the public can see the outline of what happened, but not yet the full mechanism by which it happened.

When we last dug into Sandbanks, the site was still legally in the hands of Belmont Sandbanks Limited. A Land Registry extract published in 2021 showed Belmont as proprietor of title K303815, with an AIB Group charge against the property and a unilateral notice protecting a 2020 contract for sale to Livingston Homes Ltd. Around the same time, the planning story centred on Leo Griggs. A 2020 application to turn the care home into flats was refused, then a resubmitted 2021 application was approved by Folkestone & Hythe’s planning committee by six votes to five. That approved scheme was described as a re-submission of the earlier refused application, and the committee minutes record Mr Griggs as the applicant speaking on the application.

That earlier planning history matters because it shows Sandbanks was already a complicated site before the current corporate tangle even begins. The 2021 officer report said the original scheme had been refused because, without a viability report, it had failed to demonstrate that the building was not required for continued elderly care. The same report then recommended approval of the revised scheme, saying the care home no longer met minimum standards and that nearby Madeira Lodge had been extended to absorb residents. In other words, the public planning case moved from “you have not proved the care-home loss is acceptable” to “the care-home loss is acceptable after all”.

Fast-forward to today and the legal owner is no longer Belmont. The Land Registry shows Sandbank Development Limited as the registered proprietor of Sandbanks, Coast Road, Littlestone, with the price stated as £1,650,000 paid on 31 March 2025 and the proprietorship entry dated 24 April 2025. That is a clean and simple fact on the face of the title summary. The problem is that, elsewhere in the public record, the trail is anything but clean and simple.

The company sitting awkwardly in the middle of the story is Littlestone Property Development Limited. Companies House shows it was incorporated on 7 December 2021. It remains active, but with an active proposal to strike off, and its next accounts were due by 30 September 2024. It has filed only one set of accounts, covering the period from incorporation to 31 December 2022, and those accounts were not approved until 18 March 2025. They show investment property worth £1,395,491, current creditors of £1,482,996, bank loans of £1,170,000 and net liabilities of £81,195. For a company linked to a live coastal redevelopment, that is not a picture of tidy, routine, up-to-date housekeeping.

It gets worse. Littlestone Property Development Limited has had five First Gazette notices for compulsory strike-off: in October 2023, May 2024, January 2025, September 2025 and March 2026. Four of those episodes were later discontinued, and one was suspended, but the pattern is still remarkable. A strike-off notice is Companies House effectively saying: file what you are meant to file, or we may remove you from the register. One or two such episodes can be sloppiness. Five starts to look like a business model based on leaving the paperwork on the kitchen table until someone bangs on the door.

That same company also has one registered charge which Companies House. The charge was created on 31 March 2022 in favour of Tempus Capital SB Limited. The charge document identifies the charged property in plain terms: Sandbanks, Coast Road, Littlestone, New Romney, title number K303815. It also says the security contains a floating charge and a negative pledge. In plain English, this was not a casual side note. It was serious lender security over the Sandbanks site and over the company’s wider undertaking. Companies House still shows that charge as outstanding.

The debenture behind that charge adds another important detail. It defines the linked facilities agreement as one made between the chargor, Shlomo Bloom, Nachum Yoel Weinberger and the lender. That matters because Weinberger was not just some passing name from the early paperwork. He was written into the finance structure itself. So when people try to wave him away as old history, the documents do not really let them.

Shlomo Bloom is the current director of Littlestone Property Development Limited and, on the Companies House record, the person with significant control. Weinberger was an original director and controlling person, but resigned and ceased control on 29 July 2022. Bloom’s appointments page shows a small cluster of property companies around him, including Littlestone Property Development Limited and BOWE Group Limited, plus dissolved vehicles such as Newpeach Development Limited and Newsand Developments Limited. BOWE Group itself has had repeated strike-off notices later discontinued. Weinberger’s footprint is broader: one Companies House officer page shows 32 appointments, another shows four more, and among the companies linked to him are dissolved entities and ZAR Trading Ltd, which is now in liquidation. None of that proves wrongdoing at Sandbanks. It does show that the people in the Sandbanks paper trail do not come to this site wearing spotless administrative uniforms.

Then there is the new owner. Sandbank Development Limited, note the singular, was incorporated on 20 December 2024. Its sole director is Samuel Jacob Halpern. His Companies House appointments show a longer-standing and more established set of active roles than Bloom’s, including Property Estates London Limited, For All Seasons Limited, Ambergale Ltd and several charitable or educational entities. On the face of the public record, this is not a company with years of Sandbanks history behind it. It is a fresh vehicle which appears, buys the site in March 2025, and becomes registered proprietor in April 2025.

There is also a small but interesting address overlap in the background. Halpern’s Sandbank appointment uses Dominion House, 665 North Circular Road, London, as his correspondence address. One of Weinberger’s separate Companies House officer records, for PCB Medical Int Ltd, also uses Dominion House. That does not prove Halpern and Weinberger are in business together over Sandbanks. It does, however, place names from two supposedly separate parts of this story inside at least some of the same North Circular address ecosystem. In a paper trail already full of odd joins, that is not something to ignore.

Now comes the part that really ought to make people sit up. The current title summary shows Sandbank Development Limited as owner from April 2025 and, in the summary we have seen, the Charges Register section shows the old 1922 covenants. But the older Littlestone Property Development Limited charge in favour of Tempus Capital SB Limited still appears at Companies House as outstanding over the same Sandbanks title. Those two things may yet be perfectly reconcilable. There may be a transfer deed, a release, a discharge, a deed of substituted security or some other bridging document that makes the whole sequence make sense. But as things stand publicly, one record says the old company still has an outstanding charge over Sandbanks, while another shows the site now sitting in a different company altogether. That is not proof of illegality. It is proof that the public-facing paperwork does not yet tell the story in one continuous line.

The planning trail is just as fragmented. The refused 2020 and approved 2021 applications were made in the name of Leo Griggs. Later condition-discharge applications for the Sandbanks scheme appear under Littlestone Property Development Limited. The current live variation application, 26/0218/FH, is for changes to roof height, dormers, solar panels, internal layout, bin storage and a water tank, and it is now being pursued under the Sandbank Development banner. There are also multiple condition applications on the public record for the same site, including bat mitigation, drainage, electric vehicle charging and external materials. Put simply, the site’s public history now runs through Belmont as old title owner, Leo Griggs as planning promoter, Littlestone Property Development Limited as finance-and-conditions vehicle, and Sandbank Development Limited as present owner and applicant. That is a lot of costume changes for one former care home on one stretch of coast road.

It is also worth remembering what Shepway Vox itself flagged at the time. In August 2021 we noted that the title was still in Belmont Sandbanks Ltd even as the planning and commercial story was being told through other hands, and we noted the declared discussions about possible council purchase of flats from the scheme. That earlier unease looks rather less eccentric now. If anything, it looks like the first glimpse of a pattern: Sandbanks has for years been a site where the public-facing planning story and the underlying ownership-and-finance story do not move in neat lockstep.

So what can we safely say at this stage? We can say the old care home was once owned by Belmont Sandbanks Ltd and charged to AIB. We can say the redevelopment was promoted through Leo Griggs planning applications. We can say Littlestone Property Development Limited later emerged with an outstanding Tempus charge over Sandbanks, overdue accounts, one filed set of accounts in five years and repeated strike-off episodes. We can say the site was then sold in March 2025 to Sandbank Development Limited, a brand-new company controlled by Samuel Jacob Halpern. We can say the planning paperwork is now spread across more than one corporate name. And we can say that, on the face of what is publicly available, the join between the old finance trail and the new ownership trail is not yet properly visible.

And that is why this matters. Not because every untidy Companies House filing means scandal. Not because every property scheme with multiple vehicles is automatically crooked. But because when a prominent seafront redevelopment passes through this many names, this many near-strike-offs, this many applicant identities and this many incomplete-looking joins, the public are entitled to ask a very simple question: who exactly has controlled Sandbanks at each stage, on what terms, and where is the full documentary chain proving it? Until that chain is laid out properly, Sandbanks will remain what it currently looks like from the outside: not a straightforward development story, but a jigsaw with several important pieces still missing.

One final note. We have searched for exact-match public bankruptcy or director-disqualification material on the names in this story and have not identified a clear published hit under those exact names so far. That is not a certificate of innocence, merely an honest statement of what we have and have not found. The bigger problem here is not a single dramatic notice in the Gazette. It is the far more mundane, far more British problem of a major local development being wrapped in paperwork that ought to be easier for the public to follow than this.

The Shepway Vox Team

Not Owned By Hedgefunds, Barons or Billionaires