Why should this matter to anyone else?

Obviously, those of us who use and love Stoke Lodge Playing Fields care about this – but why should anyone else be interested?

Well, for context, shared use between schools, sports clubs and informal users existed on these playing fields for decades. When Cotham School became an academy, it got a 125-year lease to use the land for PE, and that lease was written on an ‘as is’ basis – the Council, as landowner, specifically wrote into the lease that the school’s rights were subject to ‘all existing rights and use of the Property, including use by the community’. We’ll talk more about the lease another time.

And the land also benefited from a special status, as the curtilage land of a listed building (Stoke Lodge House). That’s relevant when you’re looking at planning applications, and it means that certain permitted development rights don’t apply – like, to pick an example at random, putting up a 2m high perimeter fence. So how did the fence go up without a planning application? Cotham School persuaded the Council’s planning team to remove curtilage status from the land, and to agree that it could put up the fence without a planning application – again, we’ll cover this another time – and just like that, Cotham started saying that the community’s access was permissive (i.e. is only allowed on its terms), and that it was generously sharing use by leaving a narrow, non-maintained muddy perimeter outside the fence and unlocking the gates at times to suit the school.

And it matters because this is how it happens. This is how we lose access to green space all around Bristol. Not through fences specifically (although sometimes), but incrementally, by flawed decision-making behind the scenes combined with costs and delay that eventually force community groups to give up. Well we don’t intend to do that. We’re in this for the duration, as long as it takes. But the tactics that have been used against us are the same ones that are regularly rolled out around the UK to defeat community campaigns.

For another case study, consider Packer’s Field – Whitehall Playing Fields in Bristol, which is leased to City Academy. Local residents there made an application for village green status in 2004 (which was ultimately rejected). But the wider context is that when a planning application was made in 2008 to build an athletics facility with a running track and floodlighting on the field, the planning committee noted that it was supported by Sport England and BCC officers because it would deliver ‘sporting enhancement of the site, without compromising the local community’s existing access arrangements which are facilitated through the adopted Community Use Agreement’. Even though the agreement was said to have been adopted, a planning condition was attached stating that the facilities should not be brought into use ‘until a revised signed contract securing community use of the sports facilities has been submitted to and approved in writing by the Local Planning Authority’. And now? Recent freedom of information requests* have uncovered that BCC has ‘destroyed’ its copy of the community use agreement; and the Cabot Learning Federation which now runs City Academy says it knows nothing about it. And so one gate is open in the fence for the community to access the land, for just 2 hours in an evening, as long as there’s nothing else going on. 

We won’t give up because if we do, this historic 26 acre field wrapping round a Grade II listed building which is part of Bristol’s heritage, will inevitably be developed. That doesn’t necessarily mean houses or student accommodation – it might also mean hardstanding for coaches, high internal fences around multi-use games areas, floodlighting and entry on payment only. We know that because we’ve already had a glimpse of Cotham’s future plans for Stoke Lodge. Those plans aren’t about educational benefit – there is very little educational benefit in the school wasting more than 50% of any PE lesson travelling 3 miles across north Bristol to do 45 minutes of activity, change their shoes in an expensively ‘refurbished’ pavilion and travel back again, when the school could hire facilities much closer to its main site, increase lesson times and reduce the impact on the planet. It’s about commercialisation and academy profits. And yes, schools need funding – but that’s not the deal Cotham signed up to, and it knows it. Its lease gives it the right to use the land for PE ‘subject to all existing rights and use of the Property, including use by the community’. Stoke Lodge is not the school’s exclusive private property, however often it tries to tell us that. It belongs to the citizens of Bristol and we have a right to expect that our Council will defend our access to it, as per the lease. But the Council has already shown that it won’t make Cotham stick to the terms of its lease, so here we are.

And could it be your local park next? Each new school needs sports facilities. We can’t just invent more open space for pitches, so they will have to share with other schools or with the public. But if a new school were to start off with an agreement to use pitches in, for example, Netham Park, how long would it be before the Council allowed the school to leverage that into fences, auto-locking gates and exclusive access?

The hard lesson is that warm words and assurances – even special provisions in the lease or a full-on community use agreement – won’t protect your access to open space if someone pushes the right buttons.

*To see the FOI requests, click here and here.