Game set-to and Judy’s toughest match
She’s won her controversial plans for a £37.5m legacy to her sons’ tennis brilliance, but the battle over the green belt site rages on...
AS JUDY Murray waltzed across the Blackpool ballroom in the arms of Anton du Beke one sultry evening in the autumn of 2014, you could have been forgiven for thinking she was on top of the world, not just the top of the tower.
Thanks to a glittering stint on Strictly Come Dancing and that reputation as a feisty tennis mum of a son who had recently become the first British man to win Wimbledon in 77 years, Murray was fast becoming a much-loved celebrity in her own right.
Fans thrilled over her down to earth manner, secret love of sticky cakes and willingness to admit she’d undergone Botox to stop her looking like ‘a scary monster’.
But back home in Dunblane – the town where Murray grew up, raised two tennis star sons and still kept a house – something altogether more unsavoury was brewing.
While Strictly fanatics laughed along with Murray’s clod-hopping cha-cha-cha, some of her neighbours were hurling distinctly more barbed insults after she and Scottish golf legend Colin Montgomerie fronted a planning application to Stirling Council for a tennis, golf and housing development on local green belt land.
Residents were distinctly unamused, sending hundreds of letters of objection and rousing a petition with thousands of signatures. One local even went so far as to say that ‘her legacy looks like it will be that she destroyed the green belt between her home towns’.
Three years on and Murray has finally, if somewhat painfully, got her way.
Despite an initial planning rejection from Stirling Council, followed by an appeal from Murray and her development partners which resulted in a six-day public inquiry, on Wednesday the Scottish Government announced that ministers intended to grant planning permission to the £37.5million Park of Keir development, which will include six indoor and six outdoor tennis courts, golf facilities, a hotel and spa and 19 luxury homes on green belt land between Bridge of Allan and Dunblane.
While Murray might be celebrating (she tweeted news of the announcement with a single heart emoji and issued a short statement saying she was ‘thrilled to bits’), locally the decision has been greeted with outrage and frustration.
COMMENTS on a Facebook page dedicated to ‘No housing on Park of Keir’ fulminate in furious and emotive tones with remarks such as ‘outrageous’, ‘disgraceful’ and ‘absolutely sickened by this’.
One commenter sneered that the decision meant ‘more money in the pocket of Judy Murray’.
Murray says the development will provide worldclass tennis facilities on a grassroots level, nurture future stars of the game and leave a lasting legacy of the impact the Murray brothers have made on the sport in their home town.
Locals say the project is a Trojan horse for a housing development and anyway, why build a tennis facility just a few miles down the road from the National Tennis Centre in Stirling?
Residents are already considering an appeal to the Court of Session, which can order ministers to reconsider the decision, and are tossing around the extraordinary idea of holding ‘a funeral for democracy’, complete with a full funeral procession from Dunblane to Park of Keir and a coffin representing ‘the public will’ carried by residents.
Much of the fury is directed towards the SNP, whose ministers residents believe have been swayed by the glamour and pizzazz of Brand Murray.
As novelist and local resident Douglas Jackson, who opposes the scheme, put it this week: ‘It appears that in present-day Scotland, if you have enough money and the backing of someone who was once on Strictly, the rules don’t apply to you.’ Ouch. For Murray, once the doyenne of Dunblane and mother of its most famous son, the victory must be bittersweet.
She is said to be hurt by the personal comments and has found it hard to brush off attacks from a community she has lived in all her life and done much to promote.
She is currently believed to be out of the country, keeping a low profile and waiting for the dust to settle. Given the tide of anger towards her at home, that might not be such a bad idea.
The roots of this astonishing row lie within Park of Keir itself, a pretty green belt chunk of land with archaeological remains dating back to the Neolithic Age which lies between the two affluent towns.
While locals wax lyrical about fields of bluebells, wild meadows, treasured cycle paths and nature walks on Park of Keir’s land, Murray remains dismissive of its charms.
‘It is largely two fields at the side of a motorway,’ she said bluntly during a recent appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. ‘They’re on green belt, but it’s not a beauty spot.’
Residents say they have been fighting off planning applications on the site for the best part of 30 years, ever since a proposal for a planned development consisting of a business park, an ‘interpretation centre’, a filling station, a 5-star hotel, a golf course and clubhouse, plus 220 luxury houses was submitted in 1989 by then owners of the land, Keir & Cawder Estates.
Residents were appalled and complained in their droves, and after several years of wrangling the proposal was eventually rejected by then secretary of state for Scotland Ian Lang in October 1993.
In 2002 there was another attempt at development when, with the land having changed hands, a company named KW Properties, formed by a property firm named A&L King from Auchterarder and Kilmartin Properties in Edinburgh, applied for planning permission to build a 200-bedroom hotel, an 18-hole golf course and a golf clubhouse on Park of Keir.
A new pressure group named Residents Against Greenbelt Erosion (reduced to the angry acronym RAGE) was formed by objectors from Bridge of Allan and Dunblane.
THIS application resulted in approval of a golf course and hotel on the land in 2005, with an agreement that no housing would be built on the site.
While the application was renewed in 2008 nothing was built, and the land lay untouched until 2014, when the newly formed Park Of Keir Partners lodged its own application for the tennis, golf, hotel and housing development.
Intriguingly, Park of Keir Partners is made up of Murray, Montgomerie and a property firm named King Group, a later incarnation of the firm A&L King, which lodged the previous proposal back in 2002 and has owned the land for some time.
This has led to suspicions from many locals, including Jackson, about the group’s true intentions.
‘This has never been about Judy Murray’s legacy or a dozen more tennis courts in a well-off area that already has 28 within a four-mile radius, including Scotland’s National Tennis Centre at Stirling University,’ he claims.
‘It is purely and simply about a relentless housing developer who made a speculative purchase of a piece of protected green belt land 20 years ago and who will now be able to cash in on it, using her name and the gullibility of the Scottish Government to push the door open.’
Stirling Council formally rejected the application in December 2015. Planning panel chairman Margaret Brisley said there had been 1,000 letters of objection, and only 45 letters in favour, a record for the council.
Despite Murray’s pleas for the project to go ahead, it looked like it had hit the buffers. She was devastated, and a few months later lodged the appeal that led to last September’s public inquiry.
The creation of a world-class tennis facility in Scotland is a long-held dream of Judy Murray’s. Passionate about the game – not just through her two Wimbledon champion sons Andy and Jamie but through her own coaching and her project Tennis on the Road, which sees her teaching basic tennis skills to young children – she has been eyeing a way to take it to the next step for years.
Writing in the Mail last year, Murray launched an impassioned plea for the facility.
‘Park of Keir is a grassroots
project, open to all. It is not a centre of excellence or a tennis academy, but a project geared towards growing the game through the participation of new players, encouraging a new workforce. It will make these sports more accessible to everyone, regardless of background.
‘Ultimately, this is about ambition. Do we want to see tennis in Scotland being about two players who have reached the top of the game? Or we do we want it to be about a country that has harnessed that success and turned itself into a nation that supports and nurtures one of our most popular sports?’
It’s a fair question. And it may also go some way to explaining why, when Murray was first approached by property developer Duncan King, who runs King Group, the appeal of Park of Keir was instant.
‘For me, being a Dunblane person, when this site was mentioned and I went to have a look at it, it ticked all the boxes,’ she told last year’s public inquiry. ‘It was right beside a busy main road and a roundabout and a perfect location for something that would deliver tennis on a big scale.’
And yet questions remain, particularly among locals, about the ‘Trojan horse’ element of the development.
The original application included plans for 100 houses. The most recent version – the one approved by the Scottish Government – says there will be only 19 homes.
During the public inquiry last year Murray admitted there was ‘no formal partnership’ between herself and the developers and that the inclusion of 19 luxury houses in the plan was ‘at the behest of Mr King’.
Murray, for her part, says that she trusts King. One local claimed this week that she was being ‘naive’.
It is perhaps worth noting that in 2016, following Stirling Council’s rejection of the planning application, Montgomerie pulled out of the scheme after the breakdown of his marriage to wife Gaynor Knowles, with whom he lived nearby in Perthshire.
The former Ryder Cup captain moved out of the area, leaving Murray to soldier on alone.
SHE described him at last year’s inquiry as a ‘cheerleader from afar’. Some locals wonder if the fact that the golf course was scaled down to a mere six holes (it was originally nine) may have played a part in his decision to back off.
The inquiry, prompted by an appeal by Park of Keir Partners following Stirling Council’s rejection of the initial planning application in 2015, was heard in September by Scottish Government-appointed reporter Timothy Brian.
He recommended the appeal be dismissed and in a report penned last December concluded that ‘a