130 homes will be built on football and cricket pitches after councillors gave the plans the green light.
The Lido Ground, in Clipstone, plays host to a number of clubs, including Clipstone FC for more than 50 years, and Clipstone Cricket Club.
They will now have to relocate to a proposed purpose-built replacement facility a mile down the road at Clipstone Colliery, which was granted planning permission in late 2023.
Construction work on the new housing development, which is a project of the Welbeck Estate, will not take place until the facilities at the colliery are fully operational.
If, for whatever reason, the building of the new facilities at the colliery is not completed, the Lido Ground development will not be allowed to go ahead without the submission of a new application.
The major proposal was brought before Mansfield District Council’s planning committee on Tuesday, 26 May, more than two years after plans were first submitted.
Planning officers, who have assessed the proposals over that time, told councillors on the committee that they considered 130 homes on the site to be acceptable.
The application is an “outline” application, meaning exact details such as housing types and layout have not yet been decided, and that a more detailed planning application must be submitted in the future.
The road leading to the current site from Clipstone Road East will remain the route into the area, and that there will be small parks and green spaces throughout the estate.
Sport England, was content with the promise that the new facilities at the colliery would be a direct replacement for those being built on.
At Tuesday’s meeting, agent Richard West, on behalf of the applicant, told councillors that the new sports ground a mile down the road would actually represent an upgrade on those that currently exist at the Lido.
He said: “The new facilities seek to deliver an enhancement in quality and quantity over the existing site to better meet the needs of the community.
“The proposal offers significant improvement over the specification and overall quality of the outdoor playing surfaces for cricket and football, as well as the quality of indoor ancillary facilities.”
He added that the existing sports clubs that use the site had been conferred with, consulted, and kept up to date throughout the planning process.
As well as 23 objections from members of the public regarding the loss of green space and the impacts on traffic levels and privacy, ward councillor Sidney Walker (Ind) argued that there were already too many houses and not enough infrastructure in the area.
He said: “How many houses do you want? They’ve already had some houses built next to the doctors’ surgery and they can’t fill them. We don’t have the infrastructure.
“We’ve got three shops, where all the families are going to go I don’t know. The schools can’t cope, the doctors can’t, how far do you want to go?”
On the committee, Conservative councillor Nigel Moxon raised concerns over the speed at which the new facilities at the Colliery might be built in order to facilitate the new development, with planning officer Dan Galpin suggesting to the committee that they could be ready by 2028.
Cllr Moxon said: “As a former cricketer myself, you can’t just rock up to a ground and suddenly play cricket on it. You’ve got to prepare the pitch. If you wanted to play in 2028, that pitch needs to be laid now. In fact, it’s possibly too late already to lay it for 2028.
“You can’t simply create a cricket ground in late 2027. That’s not going to happen. The pitch would be awful. You wouldn’t be able to play on it. My concern is that, if that happens, you’ll destroy a cricket club.
“And as we’ve seen in the past 20-odd years in terms of cricket locally, once a cricket club declines and can’t get a team together for a variety of reasons, it won’t come back. That would be my biggest concern – that you would put an entire cricket club in jeopardy.”
Labour councillor Rich Tempest-Mitchell also noted his concerns regarding infrastructure and school places.
However, he noted that nearby schools were only at 80 per cent capacity and highlighted the £1.2 million required to be paid by the developers towards secondary school places (21 places for £635,000), special needs education (1 place for £104,566), transport infrastructure (nearly £250,000), and the NHS (£138,000).
He added: “We clearly need the houses. People in Clipstone need the houses. There simply isn’t enough for young people to set up independently.
“For me, using this land and creating better facilities 0.9 miles away from where they currently are is probably a really good use of land and provides housing for people who need housing. It’s as simple as that. We all know we need housing.”
Councillors voted in favour of the plans.
