TVG status: what’s the impact for Cotham School?

If Stoke Lodge is registered as a TVG then the fence will have to come down. That’s because of some very old statutes that say it’s illegal to enclose a village green. But Cotham knew that when it put the fence up – the TVG applications were already in – so it has always been fully prepared for that. In fact, one local resident vividly recalls a conversation with Sandra Fryer, the school’s Chair of Governors, during construction of the fence in early 2019 where she said that the last TVG process took seven years so even if they have to take the fence down, at least they will have got that much use out of it. Sandra Fryer is the same person who asked for the applications to be ‘kicked into the long grass’ (we’ll come back to that another time) – we’ve had nearly 5 years of this process already.

But registration of the land makes no difference at all to the school’s lease. Cotham can carry on using Stoke Lodge for PE exactly as it does now – just without a fence, like it did in all the years from 2000 onwards. And actually that will be better from a sports perspective, because the fence drastically reduces the number of pitches that can be laid out on the field. This is one of the reasons Sport England objected to the same fence when the school made a planning application for it a few years ago. Without the fence they could have more pitches and different sports – for example, there used to be space for a proper rugby pitch at the top end of Stoke Lodge, but not with the fence there. More clubs could use the playing fields and access would be much easier – we frequently see people wandering the perimeter trying to find an unlocked gate, and often in the end just climbing over anyway.

Cotham School has previously relied on rolling out the line that ‘Ofsted requires a fence’. We checked and Ofsted doesn’t require them to have a fence around detached playing fields. It has said so in letters relating specifically to Cotham School and Stoke Lodge, and it has even amended its official guidance to Ofsted inspectors to make this clear. So Cotham knows that TVG registration and the fence coming down makes no difference to them using the land for PE.

And it’s clear that Cotham School believes it can do this too, despite its PR messaging to the contrary. In December 2016, when the Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee decided that the signs weren’t effective and that the land should be registered, do you know what Cotham did next? It applied for planning permission to rebuild the pavilion, explicitly on the basis that the land was a registered village green. That’s right – despite all the noise it has made and all the education funding it has spent fighting these applications, Cotham knows perfectly well that it can continue to do PE on land that is registered as a village green – that is, land without a fence. Here’s an extract from that planning application*:

So in 2017 Cotham School was clearly happy to go on using Stoke Lodge for its sport lessons after it was registered as a TVG. There’s no reason to think the position would be any different now, but if the school prefers not to do that, then it has options.

In 2011 Cotham negotiated a break clause in its lease because it always thought it might want to find alternative facilities closer to its main site. It appears from various minutes that Cotham has repeatedly suggested to the Council that it would walk away and leave the Council with the costs of maintaining Stoke Lodge if the land is now registered – presumably as leverage to keep the Council on side. But even if the school did walk away, we are ready to step up and manage the land as part of a community sports trust, and we have options for maintenance already planned. Under the school’s lease the Council actually retained financial responsibility for all the boundary walls and trees, in recognition of the ongoing shared use of the land (a big financial upside to the school, which is now restricting that shared use anyway). So the difference between Cotham maintaining the land and not maintaining the land is not as great as it wants the Council to think.

All in all, registration won’t impact Cotham’s use of Stoke Lodge unless the school wants it to. There’s no reason to think that registration would bring about anything other than a return to the peaceful co-existence that was the case at Stoke Lodge for over 70 years, until the fence went up.

*You can find this in the Design & Access statement for planning application 17/00864/F on Bristol Planning Online.