A £5M PLAN to turn the derelict former Swallow Hotel on Stockton High Street into student accommodation has been submitted to the town's council.

The highly prominent seven-storey hotel, which has been described as being architecturally "brutalist" and has been empty since 2009, will also have a ground floor pub and a health club, if permission is granted.

The students from the nearby Durham University campus will allocated 133 rooms and it is hoped they will help bring fresh life to the town centre.

The High Street is currently undergoing a £20m refurbishment due to finish early next year and there are high hopes that The Globe theatre's £4m revamp will be completed by 2017 and will bring more people into the town.

The Swallow Hotel is owned by AG Lathe, the company which also owns the adjoining Castlegate Shopping Centre but the building's lease was owned by Whitbread and was not due to expire until 2097.

However AG Lathe has negotiated a settlement with Whitbread over the lease and submitted its plans for student accommodation earlier this week. The former Ashes Bar would become a separate pub and the former swimming pool would be refurbished and used as part of a health suite.

The town's MP, Alex Cunningham, has long campaigned on the issue and at one point called for the building to be bulldozed. He said: "The success of this application would signify another key step in refreshing the face of Stockton, boosting the local economy and marking a brighter future for the entire borough.”

In a report submitted as part of the application Stockton Borough Council's Stockton Conservation Area Appraisal (SCAA) said that the building, including the Castlegate Centre could have been described as an improvement when it was built in 1972. At the time it made sense to block the town from the highly industrialised river, however it was "brutalist" and had become "an eyesore" despite some improvements to the Castlegate Centre.

The hotel and shopping centre are built on the site on of what was once one of the most important buildings in County Durham. King John and Edward I both stayed there before it was eventually destroyed by Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army some time after 1647.

A Tees Archaeology report in the planning application said that preparatory work in the 1960s will have caused damage to any archaeological deposits that survived and, as the new development would unlikely to have a significant further impact, the organisation had no objections. A dig made at the site in the 1960s recovered evidence of high status Norman stonework, probably from a hall, from the 12th Century.

No objections have been received by the council about the application.