The Pfizer site in Sandwich once employed 5,000 people

by business editor Trevor Sturgess

The former Pfizer site at Sandwich has been sold.

Now known as Discovery Park, it has been bought by a company specially set up to acquire the 297-acre site.

Trevor Cartner and Chris Musgrave teamed up with Palmer Capital to create Discovery Park Limited to buy the freehold for an undisclosed sum.

Discovery Park offers 3m sq ft of commercial space on 213 acres, including laboratories, offices and warehouses. The remaining 84 acres of the park are used for a combined heat and power plant and processing facilities.

Cartner and Musgrave already own Wynyard Park, the former Samsung site in Billingham, Cleveland, which has been transformed into a successful business park.

Paul Barber, a former managing director of Priority Sites, a government regeneration company, will become managing director of DPL.

He said: "This is an exciting project for me and our whole team. We look forward to working with Kent County Council, Locate in Kent and central and local government to secure the long term future of this site.

"Pfizer has taken a lease of around 250,000 sq ft of offices and laboratories and together with our other tenants we have around 1,000 people employed on site. We have received several enquiries from companies looking to locate to this site and we will progress these with extreme vigour."

London and Metropolitan had been expected to buy the site but exclusive talks broke down earlier in the year.

The site once employed around 5,000 people. Thousands of jobs were hit by last year’s shock announcement by the drugs giant that it was pulling out of the site after half a century.

Global reasons and changes in pharmaceutical research were blamed for the decision, although the company has faced recruitment diffhas long complained about the site’s location.

Although around 800 jobs are being retained, the site will be a shadow of its former self until new businesses decide to invest in the area or existing ones to grow.

They are being offered several incentives. Under the Expansion East Kent initiative, £35m of Regional Growth Fund money is being offered as soft loans to firms creating jobs in the area which is also part of an enterprise zone offering tax and other "carrots".