The former Brookhill Nursery, in the village of Thorpe Hesley near Rotherham, is to go up for auction with a guide price of £100,000. The building will appear in the next online auction to be held by South Yorkshire auction house Mark Jenkinson, part of the Eddisons group, on 13 August.

Brookhill was one of more than 20 nurseries and out-of-school clubs run by the Suffolk-based Alpha Nurseries group, which announced the closure of all its facilities in January this year due to financial problems. Joint fixed term receivers have now instructed that the nursery is to be auctioned.

Adrian Little, a director at auctioneer Mark Jenkinson, said: “The closure of a nursery is always sad news for the families who use its services, and we hope that Brookhill will find a buyer at auction who will bring the site back to life.”

He added: “It’s in a great location, just half a mile from junction 35 of the M1 and in a really popular residential area, so it has great potential, either as a nursery of for a range of alternative uses, subject to a buyer gaining the necessary planning consent.”

The former Brookhill nursery is a 1,500 sq ft single-storey pre-fabricated property on a 0.2 acre site between Sheffield and Rotherham. It will feature in the next online property auction to be held by Mark Jenkinson on 13 August at www.markjenkinson.co.uk