We need answers on bike park scheme

“This exquisite pocket course is to be trashed”. How beautifully David Cox’s recent letter expressed the fate awaiting Entry Hill Golf Course and the Entry Hill community. Why is the council planning such vandalism?

“To get more people more active, more often” is the council’s mantra. Do you really do that by depriving a significant group of their social and leisure activity to replace it with another? An affordable golf course and a mountain bike park might have achieved the council’s aims but destroying one existing amenity to create another fits ill with the council’s stated ambitions.

“To save money” was another reason given by councillors and council officers. It was estimated, and we do mean estimated, that Entry Hill was losing £70,000 a year. Yet, during the recent consultation and tendering process two local businesses wanted to take over Entry Hill. They didn’t ask for council subsidy. These businesses could see that continuous neglect had led to the golf course’s decline. So with a stroke the council could have been relieved of its responsibility for the course and of its stated loss. Instead it seems to have chosen to hand over about £500,000 to an outside company to unnecessarily destroy a golf course and construct a mountain bike course in its place. They could have used the money to extend the range of activities available to the residents of Bath. How does their thinking work?

Repeated incessantly is the council’s “climate emergency” agenda. It is impossible to see how the wholescale upheaval of a contaminated piece of land is going to fit that agenda. Wildlife, and there is much, is going to be disturbed, perhaps permanently, concrete laid, and noxious gases possibly released (the escape of methane is regularly monitored). At the moment the whole community has access, to a calm green space. One which the golf course bidders were planning to enhance with links to local wildlife organisations, such as the RSPB, and the gradual elimination of the harmful top dressings used by this council.

However, the whole community is now going to be subject to the enormous mental health stresses that the creation of any unknown large-scale project creates. If the project goes ahead residents are gong to have to live with this mountain bike project for the foreseeable future. The recent survey did not show much support for this initiative in the local area.

Can the mountain bike venture be a success? The council insists it has to be financially viable. What will be the entrance fee have to be in order to maintain a healthy profit? How many locals will be able to afford to use it regularly ? Will the council be forced to subsidise it? Will the planned disused shipping container cafe be a local draw? Does any of this need planning permission? Can this only succeed by being a regional visitor attraction, bringing with it more traffic onto our already crowded roads? Residents deserve an answer to so many of the questions raised by this ill-conceived scheme. Peter Savin and Elizabeth Hallam by email