Charity trustee urges councillors to approve Shrewsbury Town Greenhous Meadow community pitch plans
A trustee of a charity which hopes to develop a new facility at Shrewsbury Town Football Club has urged councillors to approve planning applications which will make their hopes a reality.
Shrewsbury Town in the Community hope to take on a new community pitch at the Greenhous Meadow stadium on a peppercorn lease from the football club.
It would be available to the wider community for 57 hours per week with the charity using it for 43 hours per week.
But the prospect of the community pitch will only become a reality if planners grant permission to allow Lidl to build a supermarket on land currently protected by a legal agreement which identifies it for community use and switching it to the club’s current training pitch at the rear of the stadium.
Nick Jones, who has been a trustee of the charity since 2015, said he now hopes Shropshire Council’s central planning committee has all the information it needs to approve the plans.
He said: “The community side has been going for years. It started in 1996 and as recently as 2014 there were only six full time members of staff.
“Since then, it has experienced a massive growth and now has more than 20 full time staff. In three years that is a massive increase in the impact they are having across Shropshire.
“They are helping people from all over the county, from the age of four to 94. They have been able to do tremendous things over the last two or three years.
“They bring lots of money into the area going after grants from people like the FA and Sport England. They get people engaged with not only the football club but sport and fitness in general.
“If they are not there doing this work, nobody else is doing it.
“With the new facility, they would have somewhere dedicated for them to use. They currently use places in the town so if it could all take place at the one facility that frees up the other spaces for other local groups.
“Not only can they increase the number of staff delivering the courses, so it is a job creation opportunity, you will also have more people coming along to take part in the sessions and it is not just football fans.
“The community trust committee are proud to be involved and we are nothing to do with the football club really. It is an arm’s length association.
“We have got our own rules and responsibilities. We want to be able to get on with getting people engaged.
“I would hope now the councillors have got the information in whatever format they need to be able to make a decision.
“I understand they have got responsibilities to hold people to account and do what they need to do to tick all the boxes but I don’t know what else can be done to get it approved.
“If they knock it back again it will negatively affect the population.
“It is not just Shrewsbury people that we work with. The community trust has taken over Ludlow football stadium so we have now got a south Shropshire hub too.
“To put events on in Shrewsbury like we had there recently would be great.”
Shrewsbury Town Football Club has also offered a £65,000 financial contribution to develop sports facilities elsewhere in the community and to provide changing rooms at the new community pitch.
All three elements of the application will be debated on Thursday. Each one comes with a recommendation of granting powers to the area planning manager to draw up new legal agreements before passing planning permission.
