Wimbledon plans ‘play down lorry disruption’
A PROJECT to expand the Wimbledon tennis club could see 10 times as many lorries pass through the area than has been estimated, critics claim.
The plans include an 8,000-seat show court and 39 tennis courts on land bought for £65million by the Wimbledon All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (AELTC).
But locals from the Wimbledon Society, founded by volunteers in 1903, are objecting to the development over concerns about pollution and the impact on local wildlife including bats.
Stephen Hammond, the Tory MP for Wimbledon, and Fleur Anderson, the Labour MP for Putney, have both objected to the development and urged residents to write to the local councils.
David Dawson, a local ecologist, said the AELTC was essentially “greenwashing” by promising to increase biodiversity and protect veteran trees as well as planting 1,500 more.
He said the development, which is expected to take more than eight years to complete, would disturb eight different bat populations in the park. “We’re very likely to lose some bat species,” he said. Other concerns include the removal of trees, and public access to the development.
Mr Dawson said residents were not “anti-tennis” but opposed to the scale of the expansion. “This is overdevelopment, it’s out of kilter,” he said.
Critics of the plan are also concerned about disruption during construction, and say AELTC have underestimated the amount of lorry journeys involved by around 10 times.
The development covers 67 hectares on land bought from the Wimbledon Park Golf Course in 2018 and will increase the capacity of the tennis tournament from 42,000 to 50,000 a day.
A joint statement from Mr Hammond and Ms Anderson calls on Merton and Wandsworth councils to hold a special full planning committee to discuss only the tennis development, and urges both councils to reject the proposal.
A spokesman for the AELTC said: “Our careful and detailed environmental work – which is publicly available – has been independently assessed by statutory bodies, who acknowledge that the Wimbledon Park Project will deliver substantial ecological improvements.”