Abbey Stadium Redditch
22 December 2009
The new designs and proposal for Abbey Stadium sports centre and swimming pool are now available. This has been a long time coming, but according to the proposed schedule this may now be complete in 2011 / 2012.
I haven't used any of the existing Abbey Stadium facilities, but I am a regular user of the Hewell Road swimming pool (currently closed for about a month for maintenance). The facilities at Hewell Road swimming pool are in such a state that a replacement is needed as soon as possible. This will be worst during the summer holidays as with free swimming for children you can hardly move in the pool then.
The current facilities have mould within the changing area ceiling, badly warped door to the toilets, showers that regularly overflow the drainage (although they seam to have that under better control now) and it frequently smells awful. Until recently there was no baby changing facilities at all in the male changing area, even now it's only got one basic table with no form of restraint to hold a baby whilst the parent gets changed. I've never actually taken my children to then pool instead choosing to go to the better facilities in neighbouring towns.
Every now and again they try and fix something, but the basic problem is that the pool is so old and out-of-date that it's really just spending money which only scrapes the surface of the underlying problems.
There are some small photos showing a few basic views of the proposed design and a questionnaire, although there are only 2 questions one of which is "do you use the current facilities".
I just hope they manage to actually get beyond the design and build a better swimming pool than is currently available for Redditch.
View designs and comment form for Abbey Stadium at Redditch Borough Council web site.
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