“We haven’t lost yet!” was the rallying cry on Wednesday from the leader of a local campaign group outraged by plans to close Kempton racecourse and build 3000 homes there.
Aerial view of Kempton
Alan Doyle, who runs Keep Kempton Green, has spent more than three years fighting Jockey Club proposals to build on land next to the famous track and claims credit for turning around the local council’s attitude to the plans.
Doyle recalled: “People said years ago: ‘You lot are mad, why are you wasting your time? This is going to happen inevitably.’ And we turned it round; the council, having been against us, is with us. The Jockey Club, who thought they would be finished by now, haven’t started.”
But Doyle was as stunned as most of the racing community this week when it emerged that the club’s plans now extend beyond the parklands alongside the Sunbury track and involve the entire site, with the result that the course could be closed in 2021.
“It’s a real shock,” Doyle continued, mulling the news over coffee in Sunbury’s Magpie pub. “We didn’t think they’d go so far as threatening to bulldoze the place. It’s profitable.” A Jockey Club spokesman confirmed that Kempton makes an annual profit, though the extent of it would be difficult to extricate from the accounts of a group that includes 13 other tracks.
Doyle argues that the local infrastructure cannot cope with significant additional housing and points to news reports from 2014 suggesting that Sunbury health centre is under as much pressure as any in Britain, with patients sometimes queuing before dawn for an appointment.
He says the local roads do not cope well with existing traffic and fears for the consequences of another 3000 cars being added.
Asked to assess his chance of preventing the proposed development, Doyle said: “I think we’re getting closer and closer to 50-50. When we started, years ago, I reckoned we had a 20% chance. It’s amazing how the facts can change if you put up a fight, absolutely amazing. If you make your local officials’ lives not nice, they change their minds. And it’s amazing how things that are ‘inevitable’ aren’t.
“We’re not alone. This is happening on sites all around the south-east and I’m sure there are places in a worse plight, with more claim to be green belt than Kempton Park. We’re not alone but obviously for us it’s important. It’s green belt and if Kempton goes, we have no chance of protecting any other piece of land in this borough. It’s a flagship.”
Doyle, who discovered the initial plans for Kempton years ago while chair of a local residents’ association, stresses he is not simply anti-development and tells of how his group cooperated with one local builder who reduced the scale of his plans. “Who knows? We may lose. But you have to put up a fight. You can’t just let it happen.”
The Jockey Club says it is faced with a once-in-30-years opportunity to develop Kempton and raise a huge sum for investment elsewhere in its racecourse holdings.
The rare opening is presented by Spelthorne borough council’s recent call for sites for new housing, coupled with the simultaneous review of the local green-belt boundaries.
The club says it will not proceed with its plans unless it is assured of raising £100m, to be spent on other jumps tracks as well as on a new all-weather circuit at Newmarket.
Saturday’s jump-racing fixture here may be an occasion for regular spectators to voice their displeasure but Wednesday night’s all-weather fixture was as sparsely attended as most such racedays. One professional gambler, known only by the name Tracksuit Dave, expressed a measure of regret. “This is my bread and butter and a lot of other people’s as well,” he said. “It’s a lovely track. It’s a travesty to me.”
Nor was he impressed by the plans for a new track at Newmarket. “The only people who are gonna go are the stable lads and they’ll get in for nothing. You’re talking about history – look at these two statues, Desert Orchid and Kauto Star. This is gutting for everybody, not just the punter.”
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Ed – Kempton Park Racecourse is situated in Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex, approximately 16 miles west of central London.
The racecourse was the brainchild of 19th century businessman Samuel Henry Hyde and staged its first fixture in 1878. More recently, Kempton Park was closed between 2005 and 2006 for the construction of a floodlit, all-weather Flat track inside the existing National Hunt track.
Kempton Park is still most famous for the King George VI Steeplechase, which is run on Boxing Day each year, but is actually one of the busiest racecourses in the country, staging almost one hundred Flat and National Hunt fixtures throughout the year.
