After having their dreams of building a new club on the Esplanade dashed, the Darwin RSL says it is now seeking a developer to rebuild at its old Cavanagh Street site that was razed by fire in 2018.

The building was finally demolished this week.

RSL president Steve Gloster said the plan is now to rebuild the club on the old site, which could include an office building.

“We’re looking for a developer who would like to develop the site and see what they can do for us,” he told Mix 104.9. “That’s always been an option to go back to that site and at the moment, it looks like … we’ll put the club back where it was.”

He added the plan was always to rebuild there but that “we’d be silly not to go and ask council whether we could have used that [Esplanade] site”.

“We only went and asked council if it was possible to go there and then it just all blew out of proportion,” Mr Gloster said. “We thought it was a perfect site for the RSL to go and it would have set the RSL up for the next 50 years, but it wasn’t to be.”

He said the new club would be family-friendly and that he was hoping to have two or three ideas put forward by early in the new year.

Club members will be shown drawings of the proposals and will vote on what idea they would like to see moving forward, Mr Gloster said.