Bunhill residents are fighting to save the Finsbury Leisure Centre football pitches, which are due to be razed to make way for 200 private and social homes.
City of London Football Club, a local youth team, who train on the pitches four hours a week, have teamed up with EC1 Voices – a group made up of residents of Paton Street, Mitchell Street and Dance Square – to campaign against the council development.
Football coach Eamon Gately, 42, said: “I’ve been to all the consultations, I can’t find anyone who is for it. They are not building family homes; they’re building one or two bedrooms [flats]. It will kill off the football club.”
Islington Council plans to build 100 council homes on the site, funded by another 100 privately sold flats. Along with the properties will be a new home for an existing GP surgery on City Road and a rebuilt leisure centre, but the proposals include reducing the size of the pitches and moving them to the roof of the complex.
Gately said: “We’ve done the measurements; it is going to be 50% less [pitches]. Once you take away space it never goes back. It just doesn’t make sense.”
The pitches are currently used by local residents, multiple schools in the area, and the 200 kids who play for City of London Football Club.
Gately condemned the council’s idea for schools to use the Britannia Leisure Centre in Hackney whilst construction is underway. “They suggested to me, ‘If your boy goes to Central Foundation Boys School, they can go to Britannia.’”
“I said: ‘How they getting over there? They going to walk?’ That is a half an hour walk. They have only got an hour for PE! What, they are going to walk, look at it, and come back? There’s no plan.”
EC1 Voices member Eva Guerra, whose son Leo plays for City of London FC and whose balcony overlooks the pitches, said the development would be hugely detrimental to the community.
Guerra said: “This is the space and infrastructure of the community. They are stripping those assets to make money, which is wrong, whatever angle you see it.”
“What we are demanding from the council, is an alternative proposal that is truly community led,” she said of the EC1 Voices campaign. “That they bring in the community in a meaningful way, to understand the requirements and the need for this site.”
Finsbury Leisure centre was built nearly 50 years ago and was last refurbished in 2004. Guerra said: “We are mindful that there is something that needs to happen, but not just like that. This is pure authoritarian behaviour from the council.”
