Save Rumney Recreation Ground & Eastern Leisure Centre

In the Council's original proposal document they listed the stakeholders they planned to consult with. We quickly realised that local people had NOT been included in the list of consultees and yet they were “our” playing fields, trees and recreation grounds. In November 2007 the Council conducted consultation meetings at the High Schools due for closure. Eventually, the Council also held a public consultation meeting at Eastern Leisure Centre, which was attended by over 300 people.

The Council did no more than provide local people with an “outline” plan - nothing was drawn to scale. The Council advised that they would only require 2.4 hectares (1 hectare = 2.471 acres) of Rumney Recreation Ground on which to build the school. According to the Council this would hold a school for between 1500-1650 pupils and incorporate the current Leisure Centre. Youth club facilities were also briefly mentioned. Car parking spaces would also eat up part of the grounds. The local community immediately “shot holes” through this proposal, realising that all of these facilities could not possibly fit onto the proposed site of 2.4 hectares - unless of course, they were intending building the “Tardis”!!

Members of the local community were fearful of:

1. Losing unrestricted access to the Leisure Centre. Members of the public could not possibly share leisure facilities with a school, due to child protection issues.

2. That the school would be built larger than the Council's outline plan, because the proposed development could not possibly fit onto such a small site. Immediately, the school would be too small and further development on the grounds would be needed.

3. Access to the Recreation Grounds would be restricted - in fact, the whole of the recreation ground would, in essence, become a school site and would no longer be available for members of the public to access (as explained in point “1”).

4. The site is situated between two major busy roads and the traffic and environmental impact would be horrendous for local residents of the two communities as a whole, plus there would then also be additional housing (due to the proposed development from selling off the Rumney High school site), with perhaps two or more vehicles per residence competing for access to and from Newport Road. Llanrumney Avenue and Newport road are already heavily congested during the rush hours.
   

5. Somewhere in the region of 200 mature trees would need to be removed for the development to take place. These mature trees some of which are hundreds of years old would be lost forever, as they could not be transplanted to elsewhere or re-situated to more convenient positions within the site.
   

6. Importantly, once built on, the Rumney Recreation Grounds will be lost to our communities forever.

We also have a letter from the Council advising that they did not plan to conduct any traffic or environmental impact assessments during the proposal stage because it would cost too much and could be a waste of money!

Residents disagree and are outraged by this decision.

Presumably the Council do not want to conduct such a survey because they already know that its findings would preclude selling off the land on the Rumney High school site for housing development, because the roads could not cope with the vastly increased congestion.

The grounds are an asset to our community and to the whole of the City of Cardiff, it is the safest piece of green, open space we have in the locality, due to being bordered by main roads and houses.