Future of Wellingborough Swanspool Gardens and Pavilion in doubt as new council REJECTS adventure golf attraction

Wellingborough Town Council received £786,697 from the Government’s Community Ownership Fund for the renovation of the pavilion and surrounding gardens, which included provision for a new adventure golf course.

At a council meeting on Wednesday (June 18), councillors rejected the golf facility, splitting councillors’ opinions.

Three options were given to the council – to install adventure golf on the upper bowling green, on the lower green, or scrap the plans entirely.

In a shock decision, plans were scrapped leaving councillors in favour of the golf attraction ‘disappointed’.

Cllr Valerie Anslow (Lab) said: “It was a very lively meeting, with a lot of discussion about the positioning of the adventure golf, and that’s been the biggest bone of contention. Eventually the result was that we wouldn’t have it.

“We had so much negative comments and misinformation, and it really swayed the voting.

“We agreed a long time ago that would be our revenue stream, so we’re now at the point where we haven’t got a revenue stream. We’ve got the money to be able to do it, and we have planning application in, however unless we can show a viable business plan to the Community Ownership Fund, there is a danger of the funding being withdrawn.

“It was really unfortunate that this decision was made on Wednesday because this garden and pavilion are going to suffer. It’s not going to become a place where families can come and enjoy, there’s no draw.”

The transfer of Swanspool Pavilion and Gardens from North Northants Council has been a two-year-long process, with the town council officially announcing it would be taking on the asset last month.

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This gave the town council the opportunity to revitalise the space and use the asset to bring more people to the town while generating a profit, however while an adventure golf course was planned to be installed on one of the bowling greens in the gardens, the proposals drew negative attention from some councillors, as well as Wellingborough Bowls Club and local residents.

Cllr Anslow believes Cllr Jon Ekins (Con) swayed the new intake of councillors to reject the plans.

In March, Cllr Ekins, launched a petition against the redevelopment of Swanspool Gardens, believing the plans to be disruptive to the ‘serene haven’, and potentially ‘rob our town of its identity’.

Cllr Ekins claims the town council is ‘blindly being led down a black hole’, and that the proposal was ‘smoke and mirrors’, ‘misconceived’, and ‘misinformed’, believing it not to be viable as ‘the numbers don’t add up.’

After the meeting, he said: “It was a fantasy, a vanity project. It was totally unviable. They want to get it cost neutral, which is nigh on impossible.

"Right from when I was on the (now dissolved) Borough Council of Wellingborough I always said ‘yes we need the pavilion and gardens, because it’s a Wellingborough asset, and a last stand place of beauty in the town.

"To dig it up and put a golf course in there – all the noise and attraction it’s going to make – takes it away from a serene garden. It’s got the Holocaust memorial there, people will sit there and reminisce about their lost one. It’s a place of thought and reflection.

“You can’t have a meeting to decide what to do in June for a project that has to be finished in December.

“There are always grants, next year there will be another one. There’s always grants to get a hold of for community use.

"So what I’m saying is let’s get it in place, let’s do what we’ve got to do, settle in. We don’t need to rush in. We need to sit back, see what we’ve got in front of us, and make a plan. We’ve got plenty of time to do that.

“The business plan just didn’t add up. Every income stream they thought of was out of the park. The costs for renovating the pavilion are astronomical, there’s no need for half the work to be done.”

Cllr Ekins disapproved of the suggestion to install the adventure golf attraction on the upper bowling green, too, noting that the bottom green is ‘still not perfect’ and ‘needs a lot of work doing on it every year’ in order to host regular play. He claims the upper green would require two to three years of work in order to make it worthy of bowls – having been in a state of disrepair for around five years— thus not meeting the town council’s deadline of December for the completion date for redevelopment.

He also questions the need for the golf course in relation to the funding, believing that the town council will be able to keep some funding from the Government’s Community Ownership Fund for the pavilion, while not moving forward with the adventure golf, though other councillors dispute this.

The Friends of Swanspool Gardens met at the pavilion on Friday (June 20) to discuss the meeting, and how it would proceed in the coming months.

There, Cllr Marion Turner-Hawes (Ind) said: “We’ve got to use the resources and facilities we’ve got. We’re trying to keep the spirit of the gardens and pavilion, and not just keep it but enhance it and bring it back to its art deco status but also to make it useful as a space for many purposes to generate enough money to sustain it and maintain it over the years.

“The town council has no other assets so this has got to wash its own face, not just the building but the whole gardens.

“We’re still so new, the town council has owned this for a month, so we’re still learning what we can do.

"We have the opportunity, with the grant we’ve got, to do something that other councils haven’t had. Unfortunately now that we’re not having the adventure golf we’ve got to find another way of at least breaking even.

“What we have been told as councillors is that if we can’t come up with a solution for this building and gardens, it’s not safe. We’ve already heard about other buildings being closed or sold, so we’ve tried to step forward and do our best for the community.

“We have to listen, we should be listening, and hopefully people saw that on Wednesday night, the town council listened.”

The funding received by the town council from the Community Ownership Fund included provision for the adventure golf course, meaning the town council and Friends of Swanspool Gardens are now tasked with coming up with a new idea for the space, and install it before the end of the year in order to avoid the possibility of the grant being withdrawn.

Later, Cllr Turner-Hawes added: “I was really upset that we chose to not have the adventure golf. I can understand the anxiety for new councillors because they’re brand new and that was their first proper meeting, so I really appreciate that many people were being cautious by not having the adventure golf.

"Some of them actually thought there was merit in it, but they were concerned about the finances.

“I didn’t get to see the detailed financial plan until May 17, and I suggested we reduce the income expectation on the adventure golf so we had more balance.

“With some of them they were close to accepting that, but on balance they chose to be cautious, which means we’ve lost an asset for the community.

“It’s upsetting that councillors chose to not give it a go, but the thing for me that was more upsetting was the decision to postpone supporting the business plan.

"I think colleagues who were not planning to vote for it should have brought their own proposals forward about how to modify the plan.

"We’re now in a situation where the business plan and the whole project is on hold, which is very concerning.

“We’re running out of time.”

Sue Belson, secretary of the Friends of Swanspool Gardens, added: “I have four grandchildren and they would have loved to have had an adventure golf, it’s not crazy golf, enclosed in that area, it would have been great. It would have been a reason for people to come to the park with their children and use the cafe.

"It’s all very well saying it’s very beautiful with the flowers, but I think you need a bit more than that.”