Wait goes on for Hove's King Alfred (From The Argus)
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Wait goes on for Hove's King Alfred
7:30am Thursday 30th August 2012 in Adam Trimingham
By Adam Trimingham
There are two rival plans for the King Alfred leisure centre on Hove seafront which councillors will soon have to consider.
One by insurance company boss Rob Starr is to knock down the current buildings and replace them with a performing arts centre .
The other is for a free Christian secondary school on the site which has been put forward by the Russell Education Trust .
There is a long and unhappy history to the King Alfred which was built as the Hove Marina shortly before the start of the Second World War.
It was requisitioned as a training school for naval officers as HMS King Alfred and the name was retained once hostilities had ended.
In those days, there were two swimming baths, both using sea water, and the major pool was rather daringly suspended above an underground car park.
This also proved to be its undoing for the supports gradually gave way under the huge weight of the water.
The old baths were converted into a dry sports centre and 30 years ago the current, fresh water pools were open.
It’s a sign of how quickly fashions change in water sports that these pools, lauded as being state of the art in 1982, now seem hopelessly outdated.
Long before that, in 1969, Hove Council bought the land next door which was known as the Royal Naval Reserve site with the aim of building a sports centre to complement the pools.
Plan followed plan into oblivion as councillors and developers found it impossible to solve the problem of how to build the sports centre with an acceptable commercial scheme to help fund it.
They were hampered by the Department of the Environment which ruled after a public inquiry that there should be no tall buildings on the site.
Eventually the council included the original building and the 1982 pools in the site which amounted to almost three acres.
Controversial plans by Citygrove in the ’90s including a casino nearly got built but failed through lack of money.
Opposition was even greater to plans a decade ago by local developers Karis which included hundreds of homes designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Frank Gehry. These also ran out of cash.
Both the Citygrove and Karis schemes had as their selling point a brand new sports centre.
Karis employed the country’s leading sports architects to design a top class scheme which would have been a huge boost for the city. This tended to be forgotten in the row over Gehry’s flats.
No such centre has been mentioned in connection with the two competing current schemes for the King Alfred.
The Russell Trust says there is room for a leisure centre and a school on the site although I cannot see how this can possibly be achieved.
It is also talking about opening the school in September 2013, a timescale which surely is impossibly short.
Mr Starr’s scheme sounds attractive but I question whether Hove seafront is the right place for it.
The sad story of the Old Market in Hove should also act as a cautionary tale for anyone investing heavily in a live arts venue.
Councillors meet on September 20 to set up a project board which will consider the future of the King Alfred once again.
The primary aim should be to establish one of Britain’s best sports centres on the site including new swimming pools.
If, as seems likely, the site is not big enough to support the commercial development needed to fund the sports centre, that should be provided elsewhere. There are council-owned sites that could be considered including Black Rock .
Unless the two current developers can come up with a new sports centre of the quality needed, which seems highly improbable, they should be told to go away.
Brighton and Hove are used to waiting a long time for major projects such as the library in Jubilee Street and the flats next to the railway station.
But many people are becoming impatient with delays to the new King Alfred sports centre which are unacceptable.
The city by the sea should have a sports centre of which it can be proud. The place is Hove seafront and the time for action is now.
Comments(2)
GraemeDavis
says...
1:49pm Thu 30 Aug 12
We would now have state of the art swimming and leisure facilities - instead of a tired pool with a grubby changing area and where "The Argus" has recently reported legionnaire's disease found in the showers.
We would have a lot of flats, badly needed in B&H. And both the building of the Gehry towers and the ongoing running of the leisure centre and the accommodation would have generated jobs.
We would also have a building that tourists would come to see. Gehry is one of the world's leading architects. To have a Gehry building in Hove would have been a real tourist stimulus and helped the whole area of Hove Kingsway and vicinity.
Now of course we have to get new plans right, and objections raised to the Gehry plans did need a resolution. But what we have seems to me to be the worst possible outcome - we're stuck with a tatty and worn-out building with no prospect of redevelopment soon - and having turned away one of the world's leading architects we cannot imagine another will even try to build in B&H.
Fundamentally this is a planning issue. The planning has to be got right, but part of that means making a decision. Year after year of indecision is not right.
nigeyb says...
11:45am Thu 30 Aug 12
There are other questions about the Russell Education Trust's suitability as a business partner. RET has nothing to do with the Russell Group of Universities and it is not a charitable "educational trust" despite their claims to the contrary on the King's School website. RET appears to have been set up in 2010 as a vehicle for supporting free school applications and development plans by a Mr and Ms Lynch, the director/owners of Education London. The latter is a small commercial educational consultancy firm based in Leatherhead. Ms Lynch was a director of Parsons Mead Trust. Some parents at Parsons Mead school believe the trust deliberately ran down Parsons Mead School in order to sell the school's assets.
More here: http://www.guardian.
co.uk/education/2006
/jun/22/schools.uk4