Party Cove or People’s Common Keele Golf Course in an Asset the Community Cannot Afford to Lose. By Adam Colclough

 

“What surprises me is how little litter we’ve found compared to last time”, says the young Green Party activist was we walk across what was once one of the fairways on Keele Golf Course.

She goes on to describe how when the party held its first litter pick on the site earlier in the year, they found everything from mountains of discarded beer cans to bits that has fallen off cars. Perhaps, she says, this shows that local people really do care about this place.

Once you get past the rather forbidding entrance overshadowed by the crumbling wreck of the clubhouse it is easy to see why. When the golf buggies trundled off for the last time in 2015 nature was left to run wild and did so in the most spectacular way.

Fairways and greens have turned into irregularly shaped meadows and the woods that used to snare the balls of unwary golfers are filled in this early spring with carpets of bluebells. It is the sort of space in which it is almost impossible not to feel more relaxed and to marvel that it exists so close to a busy urban center.

Unfortunately, it is also the sort of place a council short of money now and likely to be even shorter in they years ahead looks at and sees an asset that can be sold off. To a developer it looks like the sort of plot where they can use ‘executive’ to describe the houses they build and add a couple of zeros to the end of the price too.

That is what Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council did in 2017 and since then they have been trying to get planning permission to build between 1000 and 1200 houses on the site. Residents are, understandably, far from happy about this, 2048 singed a petition to the council opposing the plans and in 2019 the group Save Our Green Spaces (SOGS) was formed to coordinate the campaign against development.

Earlier in the day at a meeting held in Keele Village Hall the Chairs of SOGS and the parish councils for Keele and Silverdale. They described in detail the long and painful struggle they had had with the borough council.

Since closing in 2015 the former golf course has been in their sights as a development site. Over that time is has been included in a joint Local Plan between Newcastle and nearby Stoke-on-Trent that was paused by the pandemic and then collapsed late last year. The borough council are now working on a new plan in which the site is certain to be included, this is set to be published in the Autumn and put out for public consultation early in the new year.

The communities of Keele and Silverdale are, on the surface, quite different, Keele is a leafy village that could serve as the backdrop for a TV adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel; Silverdale is a former mining community which has experienced its share of social problems since the pit closed. What they both have in common is a strong sense of identity, something they feel would be compromised were the development to go ahead.

“You can’t imagine what goes through people’s minds”, another Green activist tells me, we are standing in a clearing in the woods she has named ‘party cove’ because of the amount of beer cans and broken glass lying around. It is the broken glass that causes the problem, she says, “if I let my dog off the lead this is just the sort of place he’d run to”, with predictable and possibly painful results since the glass is mostly in fragments ideally sized to get lodged in a dog’s paw.

By now it is late afternoon and despite covering most of the course we have filled less than a dozen bags. This is the first place where we have encountered any serious littering and compared to that at similar sites it is minor.

Earlier in the day at Keele Village Hall SOGS and the two parish councils had talked about how much the community had come to value the former golf course. The truth of this was clear from the number of people we had met out walking their dogs or taking exercise, even the teenagers hanging out in ‘party cove’ were showing they valued it, if in a messy and thoughtless way.

At the meeting SOGS members spoke about how they had tried and failed to get the golf course registered as a public common and an asset of community value, even though usage alone suggests it is both. Undeterred they are planning to challenge the legal basis of any development plan put forward by the council and are promoting an alternative vision for the site.

This involves making it into a community run green space that promotes wellbeing and engagement with nature and is managed by volunteers. A future that seems more inspiringly positive than the creation of another slew of identikit houses cut off from services and the community of which they are notionally part.

Spending even a short time in a place like Keele Golf Course reminds you how being in contact with nature can slow us down and give our wellbeing battered by the rush of urban life a much-needed boost. As one contributor to the meeting said, spending time in nature is ‘payback’ for the stresses of their day-to-day life for many people.

No wonder the people of Keele and Silverdale want to protect it from being covered over with houses and tarmac. As Woodie Guthrie put it for them ‘this land is our land’, not because they have the title deeds; but because they understand its true value.