Oldham Athletic - Saturday 29th October 2011

Last updated : 01 December 2011 By Tim Graham

Having a look down the league tables last Sunday morning, as I kept one eye on the New Zealand v France final, I counted, and I’ll add in a disclaimer here, I think 29 teams in the Premier League or Football League that have moved to a new ground in the last 25 years or so, there’s one for you to count through yourself and prove me wrong! But, one club that tried to move once and had a much harder time of it than most is Oldham Athletic, our visitors today having released plans for a new stadium, both in 2006 at Boundary Park and in 2009 at Failsworth.

Looking back, the 2006 plans did look a tad ambitious given that they were part of an £80 million project managed by the Frank Whittle Partnership to create the ‘Oldham Arena’ on Boundary Park. The project comprising of three new stands with bars, hospitality boxes, catering and restaurants, a landmark four-star tower hotel with 130 beds, conference facilities for up to 1,000 guests, a fitness/leisure centre with swimming pool, 100,000 square feet of office space and 300 new rented apartments for local health workers.

There was also a "fall-back" measure to sell approximately a quarter of the site - land to the rear of the Chadderton Road and Broadway stands - for a development comprising of over 600 homes in town houses and multi-storey apartment blocks. Despite planning permission eventually being granted though in December 2007, with work set to start in the summer of 2009, the economic downturn came along in the housing market in the middle of 2008 and in the autumn of that year the whole project was put on hold and then eventually shelved.

Next up came a project announced in July 2009 for the club to move to a 12,000 capacity ground at a 30-acre complex in Failsworth, the site being fewer than four miles from the City of Manchester Stadium and having a Manchester postcode, with the land itself being occupied by the BAE Lancaster Club and set to be purchased from British Aerospace, the Latics planning to twin that land with adjacent council-owned land to house their new stadium.

It was hard work getting the Failsworth locals onside for the move though, with allotment holders at Broadway allotments particularly opposed to the council selling their rented plots, with Failsworth Residents Action Group also opposing the application on the back of a 10,000 name strong petition. As well as that there was the need to overcome some legal hurdles into the actual ownership over some of the land, in particular Lower Memorial Park, and whether it was a charitable trust, based on a covenant going back to World War One, or simply council recreation land.

So, even with Oldham Council onboard at the time things still dragged on and on so much that the plan to relocate Oldham Athletic to Failsworth was eventually shelved despite the Latics having in the end managed to purchase the land as the Charity Commission finally ruled that a stadium could not be built on the site due to the World War One era covenant. The latest proposal on a new stadium for the Latics being that, after months of negotiations, and a council meeting in August of this year, the Local Authority would purchase the Lancaster Club site from the football club, thus giving it the long term opportunity to create some small sided artificial football pitches, and additional leisure-oriented retail and community facilities.

As for Boundary Park itself, Latics chairman Simon Corney told the Oldham Evening Chronicle: “We have agreed a 20-year lease with my two former partners, with an option for a further 20 years, and this has secured the future for the next 40 years. I am comfortable with what has been agreed and looking forward to getting on with it.  Eventually we would like to knock down the building, but the first thing is to rebuild the stand we knocked down three years ago. Another older stand needs knocking down, and I would hope all four stands will be rebuilt within seven to ten years.”

Some of the cost of that coming from the sale of the Lancaster Club land, while the Council  have also set forward a capital grant of £700,000 as a contribution to the redevelopment of Boundary Park based on the community work which the club carry out in the Borough, the grant also being phased and based on the progress of development works at Boundary Park. So, in conclusion, it looks like home is where the heart is after all, and there are going to be plenty more cold evenings at Boundary Park to come yet.