A CLUBHOUSE and function room at Silsden Golf Club built and mostly paid for with National Lottery cash may now be turned into an exclusive four-bedroom bungalow.

The clubhouse on the 50-acre 18 hole course at Brunthwaite was built in 2001 with the aid of a £670,000 National Lottery grant while the club stumped up some £200,000.

It was hoped the function room would generate a healthy income, but this did not happen and instead the club became mired in debt as it struggled to repay loans totalling some £500,000.

In August members saved the club by agreeing to sell the whole site in a deal which would provide a five year lease on the course and use of a smaller building as a members' bar.

While that deal has still not been formally signed, an application to turn the big single storey building into a dwelling has now been submitted to Bradford Council.

The proposal is to "re-position" residential accommodation from the two storey smaller building - which was once a two-bedroom flat for the golf club's steward - into the bigger, converted clubhouse, thus not affecting the number of permitted residential dwellings on the green belt site.

"The conversion will involve removing the existing male and female changing rooms together with the bars, function room, meeting room and office areas," states the application.

"These areas will be used to form a living room area, dining and kitchen area and four bedrooms. "The existing semi circular conservatory on the south elevation will be retained. The conversion will meet the client's requirement for spacious family accommodation with large areas for entertaining."

Dry stone walls would be built to ring the new bungalow and separate it from the golf club's small building which would be re-fitted upstairs with fresh facilities to be shared by the clubs some 130 members.

Silsden golf club secretary Tom Starkie said that selling of the club did not depend on gaining planning permission for the proposed redevelopment.

"This has all moved slower than we had hoped as there's had to be a lot of dotting of i's and crossing of t's due to all the parties involved.

"We had hoped to have completed everything by Christmas, but now it will be in the first couple of weeks of January.

"The sale is not conditional on planning permission," Mr Starkie said.

"We want to have a good relationship with our new neighbour and just want to carry on playing golf up there," he said

Silsden councillor Andrew Mallinson said Bradford planners would have to look hard at implications for the future.

"This is Green Belt and it was only every intended to be an open space for recreational, not residential use," Cllr Mallinson said.

Fellow ward Cllr Andrew Naylor had welcomed initial news that the club had struck a life-saving deal and said that as a member of the Keighley and Shipley Area Planning Panel he could not comment on specific cases.

However he said that the panel always scrutinised any proposed changes to Green Belt sites very carefully.