New plans for sport after Harrow Leisure Centre project scrapped (From Harrow Times)

New plans for sport after Harrow Leisure Centre project scrapped

4:00pm Friday 24th October 2008 in

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COUNCILLORS officially consigned their leisure plans to the dustbin last night and begun a radical re-think of their strategy for sport and leisure in Harrow.

The Tory administration has been forced to abandon its plans to build a new Harrow Leisure Centre, entertainment venue, and skatepark, blaming the economic downturn and tumbling house prices.

The project, costing £37.2m, would have been funded by the sale of land in Gayton Road and on Byron Park itself, but the council cannot get a high enough price.

At a cabinet meeting last night, councillors officially took the multimillion pound project off their list of major developments.

They have resolved to look at other ways of providing better leisure facilities in Harrow, and are considering putting money into the Building Schools for the Future programme to have more community leisure facilities in the borough’s schools.

This approach has already been adopted with Whitmore High School’s redevelopment project, and officers will be looking at other schools it will be possible for residents to use new sports facilities.

Councillor Chris Mote, in charge of leisure, said: “There is a lot going on, we are still producing a lot of future leisure facilities in the borough.

“Now we have got to develop these at a faster pace.”

The collapse of the leisure centre project also meant the end of ideas for new leisure centres in Hatch End and South Harrow.

Gayton Road Library, which was closed and put up for sale to fund the project, now stands empty and boarded up, and the council will be under pressure to put it to use.

Officers are considering “short” or “medium” term uses for it, but ultimately the site will still be sold for development when the housing market recovers.

The former library has been widely touted as an art gallery venue, but the council has so far not responded positively to that idea.

This issue is coming to a head as artists in the borough boycott Harrow Arts Centre in a row over the censorship of nude paintings and may be in need of somewhere else in Harrow to go.