Adderbury Parish Council have written to residents of Henge Close with details of the proposed reduced size Milton Road community centre.
According to APC’s letter, the building will be 34% smaller then the building approved in June 2020 by Cherwell DC. It is not clear whether APC will need to re-apply for planning permission, or whether the new building is covered by the existing planning permission.
Despite its reduced size, according to APC the building will still include a hall, changing rooms, two officials (referees, linesmen) rooms, meeting room/clubroom for sports, and a small bar and kitchen area.
What is still not clear is whether the clubroom and bar/kitchen will be for the use of the whole community, or whether it will be allocated to the football club, as some comments on social media suggest.
Based on APC’s comments, it appears that the revised building will NOT provide many facilities in the original design (see below) e.g. the dance studio, large kitchen, cafeteria, outdoor seating area and so on. Also drastically reduced is the number of parking spaces. The hall itself appears smaller than in the original design.
APC’s letter blames the Covid-19 crisis for the current lack of funding opportunities. We also note that WFAC’s application for charitable status was refused, apparently because WFAC was considered to be “too connected” to the Parish Council.
An unfortunate result of the revised design – which is forecast to cost around £1,000,000 to build – is that further public money now needs to be spent on architects’ fees (for example). As far as we can work out, APC have so far spent just under £30,000 with architects Derek Latham & Co Ltd. Based in Derby, Lathams have worked on projects such as Nottingham Castle, Leicester Cathedral, Tynemouth Railway Station, and the Water Taxi for the 2012 Olympics.
According to APC’s own figures (see below), as of February 2020 around £60,000 has been spent on the Milton Road project. Since then, APC have spent at least a further £64,000 on the drainage scheme for the pitches and for levelling the pitch area, and £3,000 on grass seeds for the pitches.
The first cut of the pitch area grass cost a whopping £720 – a small indication of the likely ongoing upkeep costs for the project.
Precise figures are difficult to establish, but we believe that to date over £128,000 has been spent on the Milton Road project. In the meantime, we are struggling to persuade Oxfordshire County Council to spend around £30,000 on traffic calming measures for the increasingly dangerous Milton Road and Berry Hill Roads.
We will update you on details of the revised scheme for the community facilities as soon as they become available. In the meantime, we will leave you to enjoy the following images of the fantastic models of the community centre made by Lathams back in January 2020. Sadly, these will now all need to be re-done to reflect the cut-back design.
