Jackets for Goal Posts. Nectar Points for Stadia.

[Cllr Cook's appalling misrepresentation of developments in the Ashton Vale Town Green Saga, and the failure so far of the professional media to report it, won't be covered here. Other blogs (try Anthony Butcher, the Ashton Gate Blogger and Bristol Indymedia for instance, or even, I'm told, on the OTIB boards) have been filling the void left by journalists and city lawyers very well without my help. Here, I'll stick to this more reflective piece about stadiamania. There may well be more.... ]

My own upbringing in the exhilaration, and more often the frustration, of supporting a football club started at Grainger Road (greyhound) stadium, then at Roots Hall, successive homes of Southend United. During that time, I must have seen both Rovers and City on their travels.  A lasting memory is the strains of 'Goodnight Irene' from the stands, and I came across this lovely
Pathe report of the 1952 United - Rovers cup match
 I was there. Probably!
Away games were a rare excursion and although we made it to Bath and to Torquay for the cup, we never reached Bristol.

 Later, Middlesbrough became my home side, and for a long while Ayresome Park was a Saturday afternoon destination of choice. But once the game had priced itself out of reach, the only time I saw the inside of the north-east's spanking new stadia, was as a guest of Her Majesty when her civil servants hired the venues for conferences. But after forty years, the Boro habit got pretty ingrained, and it's always their result I check first.

So far as I know, Sainsbury's played no part at all in Boro's move to the Riverside Stadium; that was down an ambitious club owner and the public money poured into the regeneration of the largely derelict Ironmasters District, along with a the promise – still unfulfilled – that it would trigger squillions of new private inward investment. The artwork – and the stadium – look nice, though!

Meanwhile, back in both Southend and Bristol, it's Sainsburys commercial ambitions that are being relentlessly pursued on the back of fans' passion and owners expanding egos. Whilst the Sainsbury's interest in the City and Rovers relocation, freeing them up to build megastores on the old club sites, are familiar enough, it's interesting to see how a similar strategy is being followed over in Southend.

Roots Hall is within a comfortable walk of the town centre, but well detached from its amenities. A park, some pubs, and a suburban station are close, and plenty of buses go by too. The site is is in multiple ownership, and Sainsburys want the lot to accommodate a 7,000sq.m (net) megastore with parking below and offices above (at Ashton Gate they're going for 9,300sq.m). There are 270 homes too. The minor independent owners, are ready to sell if the price is right.

The club itself is owned by a property developer, Ron Martin, through his company Martin Dawn. But the ground itself, bought largely by those fifties fans, no longer belongs to the club; it had to be sold back in 1999 to clear debts, with very little of the capital left to use for the club itself. The new ground owner, Roots Hall Ltd., is simply another corporate embodiment of Ron Martin. So Roots Hall Ltd leases the ground back to Southend United (owner, Ron Martin, as Martin Dawn) for £400,000 a year – creating such a drain on its accounts that it couldn't possibly survive without further support. OK, it's actually much more complicated than that.

 Enter Sainsburys.

They reckon Roots Hall would make a great supermarket + filling station. To get hold of it, they've provided United's life support machine for years, paying off the tax bills in last minute court deals and allowing the team and the club to survive – just. Regularly. On credit, of course.

And down on Fossetts Farm – that idyllic sounding edge-of town greenfield location where SUFC believe their destiny lies, it's Sainsburys who've offered to pay for construction of three of the four stands. I say four, though the fourth one seems to have been dropped because of the financial pressures. Just like the Ashton Vale project, the big deal isn't the stadium itself but the linked greenfield developments; a retail park, including a giant B&Q, a big hotel, and the usual outlets. There was to be a casino, too; but the sea front operators managed to stop that one. There'll be more money spinning at the Roots Hall supermarket and the value of the 'released' Sainsbury store floorspace in the town centre.

So it's not really about sport – even the professional game has only a tiny part in the big project.

The council in Southend has always backed the scheme, but without going to such expensive lengths as Bristol Council has backed City's Ashton Vale bid. In Essex, no-one's successfully gone cap-in-hand to the Civic Centre to ask for special planning concessions; normal standards apply. If meetings have been fixed and councillors' have been threatened, the evidence in Southend  is very hard to find. No public land has been sold to the applicants below its true value. The council has, however, agreed to bring a Compulsory Purchase Order to secure any land at Roots Hall that can't be secured by negotiation. That's about it.

Progress in Southend is painfully slow, and wholly reliant on the continuing goodwill of the supermarket; who are now so deep in the club's affairs that it's hard to see them walking away. But, new ground or not, the long-suffering Southend fans do have some reason to be cheerful. On the pitch, they've come back from the dead and are riding high.

 It doesn't look as much fun as in 1952. But that doesn't matter to Sainsburys.

Stocktaking Time for Sainsburys

The latest plans for a Megastore at Ashton Gate, even with the advantage of being treated as an enabling development for a new green belt stadium, have taken another blow.

This time it's the council appointed independent retail consultants, GVA Grimley, who are advising their clients (us) that Sainsburys claims' for retail impact are specious. They conclude:

"It the Council reaches the view that there are one or more significant adverse impacts, then the application should be refused under Policy EC17.1 of PPS4, with no need to take into account any of the other material planning considerations surrounding the scheme."
 
"...it is our view  that the negative impacts of the proposal outweigh any positive benefits which may accrue. In reaching this view we have given particular weight to the financial impact of the proposal and its adverse effect upon the vitality and viability of both defined centres in Bedminster. We recommend that this conclusion is taken in account by the Council as it considers and balances the positive and negative impacts of the proposal as a whole."

Add to that the very persuasive evidence that their claims of job creation are fictitious, that their transport predictions are nonsense and a few other exploded myths, and it's hard to see how the planning application (to be considered on March 2nd, 6pm) can possibly succeed.

Far more likely that Sainsburys will drop this latest application and go back to appealing against the same committee turning down their previous application. Although, of course, they claim that the current scheme is better than the previous one - and that must mean that the previous one was worse than the current one.

Either way, the whole stadium project is a mess. I know Sainsburys don't give up easily - for years they've been pouring money into Southend United to keep it solvent, given the security of its big assets - the Roots Hall ground where they want an Ashton Gate megastore equivalent, and land with planning permission for an out of town retail park to boot.

Still, I can't see myself getting the opportunity to pedal off down a new South Bristol Ring Road Cyclepath to Ashton Vale to watch the match or to pick up Nectar points and orange bags. Which is probably a Good Thing.

Expurgated !

There's a letter of mine in the Evening Post today. Well, part of it, anyway. It's been edited down, which is fair enough (though it would be far more honest if they marked each letter that's been cut, so readers know they're not looking at the original). What's more, they always seem to cut the best lines!

Have blog, will publish. Here is the original; the bits in bold never made it past the BEP editors.

" It's disappointing to see Stockwood councillor Jay Jethwa (August 5) condemn those councillors who decided, on the evidence, that the Sainsbury's superstore should not be permitted at Ashton Gate.  There is no reason for her to imply that party pressure was put on those councillors; after all, the LibDems have been as transparently pro-stadium as Tony Blair was pro-war.  Presumably Jay writes because, like all councillors, she's been targetted by the club's campaign to get fans to put pressure on individual members.

Jay might have been better advised to challenge the Cabinet decision to hand the club £5 million of land in an unsecured deal, in exchange for 'community benefits' spread over 30 years. 

Members of all parties, including her own, who scrutinised the sale advised against such a high-risk comitment of public assets to a very shaky business.  Jay's Tory instincts should have warned her against such extravagance with the public purse. Above all, her commitment to her Stockwood ward should have alerted her to the fact that every handout to the club, whether as land, as planning concessions (that's another £3.2 million plus), or as an inappropriate planning permission, must be recouped by squeezing wards like hers even harder. 

The 'affordable housing' that Steve Lansdown won't now have to provide at Moorelands will have to go disproportionately somewhere else.  The cash that should have come to the council from the Ashton land sales will have to be found by selling off land, or cutting services, somewhere else. Stockwood seems especially vulnerable.  And the changed traffic and cash flows caused by such a big superstore would have repercussions throughout South Bristol and beyond.

In short, however much we'd like a new Bristol City stadium, there are limits to the public risks and sacrifices that should be made to get it, especially in a time of savage cuts. 

Pete Goodwin
Green Party, Stockwood "