GEORGE TOWN, Sept 4 — The owner of the rundown Runnymede Hotel asked the Penang Island Municipal Council for three months to restore the heritage building pending finalization of the land ownership title transfer.

Penang local government and traffic management committee chairman Chow Kon Yeow said the process of transferring the land ownership from the Defence ministry to the developer, Runnymede Hotels Sdn Bhd, is still being processed.

“The developer wrote to us on August 7 following the council’s notice to them and they had asked for between one and three months to install security fences, clean up the site and restore the heritage buildings,” he told a press conference this morning.

The developer stated that it first needed to resolve the land ownership transfer issue with the Defence ministry.

The land, where a cluster of abandoned heritage buildings stands along Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah, previously belonged to the ministry.

The main three-storey building, widely known as Runnymede Hotel, was built around 1921 and the premises used to be an army base for the British in the early 1940s before they handed it over to the government of Malaya in 1957.

The ministry only transferred the land ownership to Runnymede Hotels Sdn Bhd in February this year and even though it has been left abandoned for over a decade after the army base moved to Sungai Ara, the land was still under the purview of the ministry.

“They informed us that they are in the process of getting the ministry to hand over the full rights to the land to them,” he said.

However, the developer had promised to clean up the site in two weeks’ time in a letter dated August 7 this year.

“We conducted checks on the site this week and found that the work to clean up, secure the area and restore the building has not started yet,” Chow said.

“We have asked them to speed it up and to complete it all before three months,” Chow said, adding that council will be monitoring the site closely.

According to council’s procedure, if the heritage buildings are still in a dilapidated condition despite the first notice issued, the council will hold an inquiry before further notices are issued.

Runnymede Hotels Sdn Bhd was given planning approval in 1999 to construct a mixed development of three office blocks and a block of hotel on the site.

According to Chow, the planning approval is still valid until today because they have already built one of the office blocks, Bangunan KWSP, which is next to it but only the heritage buildings site was untouched.

According to the planning approval, the main building, number 40, must be preserved and restored.

Last month, Malay Mail Online featured the rundown state of the Runnymede Hotel.

The three-storey main building, in a neo classical design, was built around 1921.

More than a century ago, this was the site where Thomas Stamford Raffles built his home, called Runnymede, along the North Beach, back in 1808.

Runnymede was one in a row of elegant villas along  that stretch of road, known as Northam Road, facing the sea at that time.

Raffles, his wife and his two younger sisters lived there until 1811 when Raffles moved to Malacca and the house was put up for sale.

Unfortunately, the original structure burned down in 1901 but the surrounding buildings survived and were renovated.

The collection of buildings was then converted into the Runnymede Hotel to compete with the E&O Hotel.

Some time in the 1920s, the three-storey main building was constructed adding another building to the collection of four smaller buildings that made up the whole Runnymede Hotel.

It was the ground floor of this grand three-storey building that housed the grand ballroom where balls, cocktails and dinner dances were held regularly.