Today's Leicester Mercury carries the less than startling news that an alternative to siting football pitches and their accompanying development on the city's most important nature reserve has been identified:
Leicester City Council is planning to split the development between two areas either side of the meadows – Riverside College, in Braunstone Lane East, and Aylestone Playing Fields, off Narborough Road South, where there are already a number of disused pitches.The paper also quotes Herbert Eppel (Hello, Herbert) from the Aylestone Meadows Appreciation Society:
"As a group we had suggested this site probably about a year ago."In last week's elections Labour won all but two of the seats on the council - more on that another day. Interestingly, one of the two seats they failed to win was in the Aylestone ward, where the Liberal Democrats gained one of the seats.
I hope that this was because of Labour's earlier enthusiasm for building on Aylestone Meadows.
Another viable location? I'm in shock! Shurely Shome Mishtake?
ReplyDeleteHello Jonathan - Yes, AMAS certainly suggested ages ago that the Riverside site should be looked at seriously, but I'm actually not entirely happy with the way my other comments were reported in the Mercury article. I basically didn't say much on the phone and tried to make it clear that it is too early to comment until after tomorrow's AMAS meeting (after all, there would still be additional floodlighting etc. and I personally certainly wouldn't be over the moon about that, although AMAS may well decide that we can live with the Riverside proposal as a compromise). More news on Thursday, I dare say.
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