The Avenger wrote:
Thinking of a future West Stand development and the positives we could use to persuade the residents who live behind to allow a new stand to be built.
Surely if a new stand went up it would look significantly better than what they look out upon at the moment. Secondly it would clear up the alley way that is such a mess right now and there could be security lighting and cctv which would make it safer. Finally there’s the mitigation of sound from the games, crowd noise, music, Announcements and even the diffusion of light from the floodlights.
Food for thought going forward if we think we’ll face objections from the residents
We don’t need to pursued the residents behind. So long as the new stand was no higher than the old West stand there is a precedent set.
Also I know that the club put in planning in 2000 for a West stand replacement and that was passed provisionally.
However the simplest way around it is to build a terrace up to the height of the existing wall. Then put in a temporary roof requiring no planning permission. If you want to know roughly what that will look like see then existing west terrace roof, as that is a temp structure. It will look like that but will be exactly 8 feet taller, and yes that’s an exact figure.
But to answer everyone’s point, it’s still way more money than we have.
Actually no it’s not, we could afford to do it next close season but you can forget about keeping Murphy or signing top players.
It’s a very simple equation. The new East stand will give us full facilities at last. The ground will hold roughly 8000. At present we don’t get close to that in attendances. We won’t get close to that no matter how great the west terrace is without a good team playing good rugby.
So spend on players or carry on upgrading the stadium. Sadly we can’t do both on the short term. So I’m for players from now on, and that’s hard for me as I’m a stadium fanatic and would love nothing more.
One point of note. The west terrace is only an issue if it’s full, which it rarely is. It’s only the bottom few steps that offer unacceptable viewing. The terracing itself is in decent shape, unlike the North terrace there is no safety issue. It’s simply not a pressing issue until we really start to test the capacity more often.
Plans are in place, both simple and more elaborate but they are on hold unless we snag another 500k to upwards of 2 million depending on the plan used.
Hope that helps.
