River Park – Letter to the Chronicle

It’s over a month now since the twelve ‘expressions of interest’ for the old leisure centre site at River Park were put on public display; Winchester City Council is sifting through them, no doubt applying proper due diligence, before announcing the result some time in June.  Considering it took from November 2021 to summer 2025 to realise that the University of Southampton was never more than a reluctant partner, this looks like unseemly haste.  The reason for that is WCC fears losing any receipt it might get to some successor authority pending the massively confusing local authority reorganisation.  Maybe not the best way to make a decision.

The marketing agents suggested possible uses might be education, museums, libraries, public halls, places of worship, and law courts, all these being apparently permitted by the F.1 Use Class.  Hopefully any developer coming forward for any of these will realise that Winchester has most of them, paid for by public funds, and they mostly struggle.  The city really doesn’t need more.  And William Barrow Simmonds, who sold the site to the city for a below-market sum, was adamant he did not want a school on the site.

Several of the Expressions of Interest received said that they would look to repurpose the current building, rather than demolish it.  Perhaps they are unaware of the urban explorers’ video of a few months ago, showing the high-performance sports floor wrecked by flooding, or of the survey WCC itself commissioned into the state of the building before deciding to replace it.

When the now-redundant swimming pool was built, a report on recommendations for the foundations, dated June 1966, said “we assess the extra costs of constructing the building on this site over that of constructing it on an ideal dry site to be approximately £15,000″ – equivalent to at least £250,000 now (Bank of England figures); plus construction costs have outstripped general inflation.  WCC acknowledges it is a difficult site to develop.

There’s apparently one would-be developer who thinks the site would be perfect for a care home.  Not only have numerous homes around the district closed in recent years, the site is in a category 3 flood zone, the highest risk – as anyone who has walked there this winter, or in many previous winters, could guess.

WCC voted to spend £130,000 on marketing the River Park site.  How much did the UoS débacle cost?  To counter the “risk that benefits will not be achieved” (from WCC paper CAB3466) the council will employ “a suitable qualified consultant”.  If only they’d thought of that before.

Judith Martin

Romsey Road

Winchester