Banbury
Pool Campaign :
Summary of the Banbury
Experience.
An Open Air Pool Support
Group, in one form or another has
been an important contributor to the success of Banbury’s
Woodgreen pool since it was opened in 1939. For almost fifty years the
pool locally managed by Cherwell District Council together with the
voluntary Support Group that organised fundraising events and bought
new equipment worked together to provide a Banbury with a hugely
enjoyable and memorable summer experience. A film clip of pool events
in the 1980s is on the website.
Then in 1998, a year before the pool’s Jubilee, things began
to fall apart. Part of the new fibreglass lining peeled away two days
after the pool opened for the summer season. It was closed.. Expensive
refurbishment was undertaken. It was a fiasco. Consultants came and
went. Different solutions were tried. The Pool Support Group were
suspicious of work and decision-making but remained supportive. After
all the community was proud and fond of its pool. Were the problems
being exaggerated by officials or not? Decisions were being made
privately. There was no proper consultation. Expensive refurbishing did
not solve the problems. The local grapevine accused slapdash
contractors and incompetent management. The Open Air Pool Campaign
began to raise local awareness of the real risks of losing our pool
altogether.
In 2003 a new management
company was brought in by Cherwell
District Council. Swimmers and fans of Woodgreen hoped all would be
well. Soon however mysterious blisters were reported on
children’s fee at the shallow end.. The evidence was
unsubstantiated and no
written complaint was made. Common sense views were that if kids stayed
in the water for hours splashing in the shallow end without foot
protection of course some of them might get a blister., but the
Council’s Health and
Safety officers closed the pool and later insisted on it being emptied
in case trespassers fell in.
In April 2005 the
community learned that a District Council
might be planning to close the pool permanently. Fill it in and build
on it. The campaigners (us) quickly organised a demo at the District
Council offices. They organised a petition of over 5000 local citizens
and demanded to be heard. As a result the councillors agreed to
postpone any decision and think again. We began a campaign of 'shock and
awe'.
In July 2005 we organised
a public meeting at which
councillors and officials were invited to answer questions about the
pool. Over three hundred packed the hall at Woodgreen and at the end of
an emotional and often acrimonious discussion it appeared that, if
Cherwell would restore it to good quality condition, then Banbury Town
Council might be prepared to take it over and run it.
At the next full Town
Council meeting it was decided to set up
a working group of councillors to look at options and guide the process
forward. In the spring of 2005, they appointed a firm of management
consultants, Knight.Kavanagh and Page, to research and
write a feasibility study. Six months later they produced an assessment
of the future of the open air pool that argued it could never be a
viable facility. They put a number of options and pessimistic costings,
none of which would have met the needs of the community. They
were sent off to revise and enlarge on some of those options and
another six months passed while this was being done. In September
2006 KKandP reported again. putting forward further detail about the
pitfalls that might overtake a new management of the site. They offered two solutions.1. Fill in
the pool and sell off the land to a property developer. 2. Hand it over
to the British Canoe Union to use as its National Headquarters,
Training Centre and competition venue. There might be major funding for
such a venture. In order to generate more income for the existing
dryside it was proposed to stimulate the Banbury Bowling Club to
maximise its membership which had been falling in recent years. No
guidance was offered in how to improve and enhance the usage of other
dryside activities.
The current state of play
By the autumn of 2007 Banburuians
were still without a pool but Cherwell
District Council had moved away from a purely negative view that
it could not afford to spend the sort of sums required to modernise,
refurbish and manage both the pool and the other opportunities
They had challenged the Banbury Town Council to make a commitment to
the running costs of running a pool by consulting its neighbouring
villages and Banbury consulted and made an offer of £50,000 a
year from a small increase in its rates. In response Cherwell
proposed to set aside the
sum of £500,000- later increased by a further £250,000 - to
re-open the pool provided a satisfactory business plan was
proposed.
In the early summer of 2007 CDC again made a positive step forward.
It instructed its Scrutiny
Task and Finish Panel to look more closely at all the options available
to reach a 'positive' outcome to WLC. The results of this programme was
keenly awaited by potential swimmers and users..At
the same time the Pool Campaign began discussing with other groups
using Woodgreen,- the Bowling Club, the Triathlonists, the Canoeists,
Health and Fitness devotees, Fencers, Badminton players, Old Time
Dancers and others - how to create a community company able and
powerful enough to carry out a welll thought out business plan not
only for the pool but also encourage all the users of the neighbouring
community centre and to generate all kinds of new activities and
opportunities not yet available. We all agreed that we needed a strong
community representation..We were able to offer all the members of this
new group for consultation with the scrutineers.
Throughout the whole of our campaign we have kept the press and local
radio stations fully informed about the state of play and they in turn
have coopersted by giving the campaign a generous amount of coverage
and commentary. In 2007 it was decided to creaate a web site on
which our campaign news could be spread both locally and nationally. It
was linked up with the growing number of swimming organisations and
societies concerned with the experience of others and for the sharing
of ideas and information about other lidos across the world. Some of
these are listed in our Contacts page.
In Octoberr 2007 CDC's Scrutiny Panel made up of 'back-bench'
concillors who are not on the Executive, the main decision making body
of the Council reported to the Environment and Community Select
Committee under whose remit it had been carrying out. This report is
available on the Cherwell District Council website at
www.cherwell-dc.gov.uk or by direct enquiry to Steve Lodge, Democratic
Services Officer at 01295 221590.
It is a comprehensive and thoughtful document that other swimming campaigners around the country might usefully read.
In brief the Scrutiny Panel had listed four alternatives
for the future of Woodgreen. It prefaced these with cogent
arguments that underscored their recommentations. Among
these the report said
-that the Council could no longer sit on the fence and ignore Woodgreen and some action needed to be taken.
-the Panel had looked at what was possible and what was affordable
-the line had been taken that Woodgreen and the pool would be
regarded as a District facility and that the preferred option must be
to the benefit of Cherwell the implications being that the financial
costs should also be borne across the district.
- this did not distract from the the fact that Woodgreen was at
the heart of one of the most economically and socially disadvantaged
areas of Cherwell and that there was a need for investment in the
community.
-The Panel had agreed that the Council did need to make an investment in community facilities at Woodgreen.
After discussion the Committee agreed to recommend to the Environment and Community Select Committee:-
-- that a new open air pool from rthe existing infrastructure be
provided of the same dimensions as current, with a reduced deep end, a
refurbished flume, a splash pool for very young children and made
available for up to ekght weeks a year.
-- that the dry side facilities be refurbished to maximise all year round local community benefit.
-- that a minimum capital sum of £1,276,000
-- that the projected annual revenue costs of operating the above are estimated to be £120,000 a year.
These recommendations were passed up the chain of command at CDC
and approved by the Executive Committee on June 2nd 2008.
Work has now begun on the tendering and costing of the refurbishment so
that hopefully the pool and the dry side improvements will be available
in June 2009.
This is a huge step forward and one that was hardly dreamed about in
2005. It is a victory for common sense. There remains one area of the
plan that we will still be campaigning about. It is clear from the last
published minutes of Council meetings that the Recreation Officers at
CDC would prefer to have Woodgreen under the umbrella of the new
commercial contractors of Spiceball, Parkwood Community Leisure who
have been signed up to design, refurbish and manage a portfolio of
facilities that have long been in CDC's Sports Modernisation scheme -
refurbishing of sports facilities at Kidlington and Bicester and a new
Spiceball Park Sports Centre on an island site behind the existing
Spiceball, twice closed in recent years because it was built in the
middle of the flood plain. A new company called Cherwell Leisure Ltd,
will undertake the building and the management of the three sports
centres. We are opposed to the new company running
Woodgreen. It is not processing plant like Spiceball. It moves to a
different tune. It should be directly available to the local community
and be capable of improvisation, of initiative, of flexibilty in its
agenda and above all be a fun place. We believe that the new Cherwell
Leisure will have its hands full managing the new centres. Woodgreen
should have a community controlled management constructed in liaison
with CDC to make sure that the errors of the past are not repeated but
sensitive to the changing needs of the local population. There are good
examples around the country. We will return to this theme at a later
date.
When the open air pool was
re-launched
after WWII, it quickly
became one of the favourite summer delights for tens of thousands of
locals from the town and villages around. It was a special experience.
It was a fun place, a friendly place, a relaxing place. It was possible
to spend the whole day in and out of the water. Banbury was as far from
the seaside as it was possible to be and travel abroad in the forties
and fifties was not yet available or popular. Cheap travel
and
sunny tourist destinations made Lido's at home less attractive. But
times have changed. The costs of overseas holidays have sored and fuel costs are spiralling. Now
the talk is about healthy sports and leisure facilities to fight
obesity, to confront climate change and longer hotter summers, to
persuade people not to fly so much and use facilities closer to home,
to provide ‘added value’ to use a current phrase.
So
a well run open air pool can again be a delight and a special
experience. The
future beckons.