Club sports on the village green

It’s the classic image, isn’t it – the local cricket club playing a match on the village green; grassroots football for players young and old. And yet we hear that there are rumblings from Cotham School that it intends to stop hiring pitches to local clubs and to mothball the pavilion, now that Stoke Lodge is a registered village green. So what’s going on?

One of the key, well-established principles about a village green is that you can’t charge residents in the locality for access to the green. Their right to use it is recognised by registration after 20 years of ‘as of right’ use has been shown. But it’s also well-established that the nature of the use to which the locals are entitled is broadly what it was during that 20-year period. So the activities of the landowner that were going on during those decades – like school sports and club use – can also continue in the same way on a village green.

As far as we can tell from what we’ve heard to date, it seems that Cotham School has been telling clubs that it can’t control use of the field any more, including being unable to hire out pitches. But that’s not right. The Open Spaces Society says this:

• Can commercial enterprises take place on a village green? eg football/cricket/golf clubs; festivals
• It may be possible in limited circumstances if it does not interfere with the rights of local people to use the land.

These are those limited circumstances. Clubs have been hiring pitches at Stoke Lodge for decades, and that use was never ‘as of right’ – it was paid for (licensed and permitted). So it’s not the same as the right of local inhabitants. And there is no reason why that type of commercial activity cannot continue on a village green – a recent Supreme Court case has made that completely clear.

A quick Google search shows plenty of other bodies happily offering pitches for hire on their village green. Some differentiate their charges to clubs depending on whether the majority of members live in the locality or not; others simply charge for the use of a specially-maintained pitch area at a specific date and time. The point is, if Cotham is suggesting that village green registration creates problems for grassroots sport, they are wrong or have been badly advised.

What about the pavilion? Well, the pavilion itself is outside the registered village green area. It remains a Council building, but is part of Cotham’s lease – and not so long ago the school spent around £600k of public money (£430,800 of which was a grant from the Department for Education) on refurbishing the building. When it was asking the Council to allow it to push through quite substantial works as ‘repairs and maintenance’, the school stressed how committed it was to grassroots sport. The Council sent a letter to local residents saying:

Does the school now intend to mothball the pavilion and refuse to allow clubs to hire it, despite having received and spent so much public money doing it up on the promise of creating a facility for clubs across the city to use? If so that seems highly objectionable. This remains a publicly-funded, publicly-owned facility of which Cotham School is the current tenant. It can choose whether or not to hire it out, but there is a moral aspect to that choice, and a social responsibility to the city and to the clubs it claimed to support.

As a community, we have fought for village green registration to preserve access to Stoke Lodge for the school, for sports clubs and for local residents. We are 100% committed to seeing club sport on Stoke Lodge and if Cotham School is considering placing obstacles in the way of those clubs to restrict or prevent their use, we hope it will reconsider. Perhaps the school has misunderstood the legal position and will think again – we hope so. This should be a wonderful space for all to use – just as it always has been.