Your editorial comment (City council must grasp the nettle, August 21) is right to say that many people will be surprised, if not shocked, about the state of the old River Park Leisure Centre shown in the urban explorers’ video.
We’re told that about £80,000 a year is being spent to secure the building, and yet clearly there have been many trespassers - the interior (as well as every exterior surface) is richly graffiti’d. In addition the roof is obviously not watertight - water has got in and ruined the floors and the equipment that might have been reused.
Read more
- Comment: City council must grasp the nettle and decide the fate of the leisure centre
- 'The decay was very shocking': New video shows the state of River Park
- 'Our rivers' health is not one person's responsibility'
- New photographs show progress on construction of new River Park pavilion
- Three parks retain national recognition for high standards
And that is surely the most shocking thing. For all its expressions of net zero and environmental concern, the contents of the leisure centre were simply abandoned. It was never a question of keeping the building to restore it - the intention was always to demolish. Yet good and no doubt expensive wooden floors were left to decay when only metres away the new cricket pavilion was being built - with, presumably, new wooden floors.
There are heaps of chairs, and masses of sports equipment, from table tennis tables to pool toys - are there no other sports centres or community facilities in the district or county that might have made use of them? Even selling them privately to recoup some of the cost would have been acceptable.
Architectural salvage has been big business for decades now, and households are urged to recycle just about everything. Yet somehow no-one thought this might apply to River Park.
PS: Advocates of a lido do not generally say, as you suggest, that the swimming pool could be retained. It was never properly restored after the fire in the mid 1980s, and WCC has credible surveys showing its unsafe state. There are examples of open air pools in remarkable reused structures - the most notable perhaps at Zollverein, in Germany, in the UNESCO World Heritage Site in the old mining area - but River Park really doesn’t compare.
Judith Martin,
Romsey Road,
Winchester
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