New Plans for the Walker Cricket Club

Copies of the revised Walker Cricket Club are now in circulation. If you are interested in seeing them, drop me an email and I’ll get in contact with you. After a quick spin through it is apparent that they have knocked off the top level of the building, re-designed the roof to a more traditional sloping affair and reduced the overall dimensions of the structure. So they would argue that they have “significantly” reduced the structures impact to the surrounding area.

However there are a number of outstanding caveats:
1. The increase of parking spaces remains onerous and implies anticipation of significant traffic
2. With the exception of a changing room area (marked male & female), there are still no specific features designed for cricketers. They have labelled a bar area the “cricket bar” but, as I say, that is just a label. One example of what’s missing is that there are no storage facilities for cricket gear, which means that it remains true to say that cricketers will have less facilities than they currently suffer in the proposed plans. Ironic considering this is supposed to be a cricket ground.
3. The overwhelming focus of the building remains a drive to create fitness/health club, complete with swimming pool, treatment rooms, fitness centre and gymnasium areas. Nice as this is, I still cannot believe they will get the traffic required to turn a profit in an area awash with similar centres and it still leaves the future viability of the grounds themselves uncertain as revenue generation is switched to internal activities.

As was the case in the original plans, my opposition is not against the decision to build the structure, as it is their land, the original building is an eyesore and the cricket and squash facilities are crying out for better facilities.

My objection is that the plans propose a development whose prime sources of revenue generation are from internal fitness activities at the expense of sports – such as cricket – that utilise the grounds. Cricket will become ever more marginalised by the march of step aerobic classes etc. and the grounds will continue their steady decline to the point where their value to property developers will become increasingly attractive to the Walker trustees.

Whether the council planning office has the ability to consider the proposed business activities and their relevance to the Trusts responsibilities for the grounds or not is an important point to discover, because on purely structural terms the trustees have indeed “listened” to our objections.

I will be doing some more research on this matter and will report back as soon as I hear anything. In the meantime if anyone has any comments to make, feel free to use the comments link below this piece or send me an email and I’ll get back to you asap.