Let’s face it, this winter has not been the best time to undertake a major building project. Rain, followed by snow, followed by more rain. Add to that the tragic death of a construction worker and an impending judicial review, you would think the man in charge of The Rose Bowl development would be feeling a little less than positive.

Not so Group Managing Director, Glenn Delve. Although he is the first to admit that the timetable for The Rose Bowl’s £48m development has fallen behind – at both ends of the ground. In fact work on the hotel at the Northern End has not even started, due to the judicial review of Eastleigh Borough Council’s involvement sought by a group of local hoteliers.

“We are trying to head off the requirement for a judicial review one way or another” Glenn told me, “but time is becoming worryingly short.”

In fact the Northern End does give every impression of being ready for action, with the old media centre and the acoustic fencing having been removed. Naturally, where the media are going to be based this summer is of great interest to me.  “The plan always was that the domestic media facility would be in the new West Stand, and that will be ready by the beginning of the season” Glenn reassures me. “But clearly, on Major Match days the media were going to be in the hotel. Although we don’t know when the hotel will be delivered we do know that it will be delivered at some point, so there seemed little point in keeping the old modular building. We’ve discussed our contingency plans at length with the ECB’s Major Matches Group and what we will do is put the international written press, radio broadcasters and photographers into the East Stand for this year, and possibly for the Test Match in 2011 if the hotel isn’t ready. At the Northern End, Sky will build a temporary TV gantry as they have done at other venues.

“Obviously the stands have a lot more in them than just the media! They have catering facilities, permanent toilets, the match day control room, hospitality suites and of course the covered seats and covered concourse area.”

Computer generated image of the completed ground

All of which begs the biggest question in the minds of Hampshire members, ie, how the ground will have changed when they turn up for the first home game on Sunday 2nd May. The answer is blindingly obvious to those of us who visit The Rose Bowl throughout the winter, but to the vast majority who only come to the ground when there’s a cricket match on it is a cause of great interest, if not concern.

“Gosh” says Glenn, uncharacteristically seeming slightly overawed by the magnitude of what I’ve asked him to describe. “When they left last year they saw the pavilion, a set of West Gate turnstiles and a new perimeter fence. They had the old media centre at the Northern End and a lot of portacabins. This year they will come up to the same West Gate turnstiles but won’t be able to help but notice two rather large spectator stands, one either side of the pavilion. They will have 5,000 new seats, which are new seat units which we think will be more comfortable, and of course the new toilets and catering and covered concourse.

“What we’re trying to do for domestic and international matches is to retain the main pavilion as a members’ and hospitality area. It’s a way of giving something back to our members and giving them the maximum benefit of this particular facility.

“At the Northern End of the ground the white modular boxes of the old media centre have now disappeared but what is not yet clear is whether they’ll see the beginnings of the new hotel building. They will notice that the parking area will be a lot flatter and will no longer be green! That’s part of the process to turn it into a larger, firmer surface that can be used for parking even if it has rained. They may also notice a new road that spurs off next to the golf clubhouse, which will exit the site onto Moorhill Road, but that’s probably only for the eagled eyed. Those who park by the West Gate and walk straight in will probably be blissfully unaware of it.

“Inside the ground there’ll be a new scoreboard. We’re not yet putting in the new replay screen because it’s going right next to the hotel development and we don’t fancy putting in half a million pounds worth of screen and getting a steel girder through it! We’ve taken a rather more pragmatic route; we did think the previous scoreboard was past its sell by date and was rather embarrassing for night fixtures because you couldn’t read it, so we’re putting in a new board with LED displays which will be visible day and night. It will be in exactly the same place as the old scoreboard, but what will change is that at the beginning of the season the small repeater board on the East side of the ground won’t be there. The new repeater board will be suspended from the roof of the East Stand, which won’t be ready until early June.”

It all sounds wonderful, but as I write (towards the end of February) there seem to be an awful lot of steel girders bolted together but not much else. To my untutored eye it looks as though it will need a bit of a canter for everything to be ready. “That’s a blessed understatement” confirms Glenn. “Over the winter period we’ve had the worst weather for thirty years, so bad that we were not able to pour concrete for three weeks; we couldn’t even get access to concrete for pouring because the water supplies at the concrete factories were frozen. And clearly it was already a very tight timetable to build stands of the size we’re building in one close season.

“People may also be aware that we had a tragic accident on site, and that inevitably has led to further delays. So we’re going to have to crack on at a good rate and possibly with a bit of better luck to hit our deadlines. But the news at the moment is that we still expect to be finished on time or very close to. Clearly the West Stand has to be ready otherwise we’ll struggle to get people in and out of the ground, but the contractor is very well aware of that. The East Stand is where the pressure will be.

“If the hotel has started with the East Stand not finished we will be more limited in the seating we can offer. But with a development such as this one learns to think on one’s feet. That said, all we can commit to at this stage, is that we’ll have as much of the ground open as we possibly can. But the hotel construction will occur around the cricketing calendar, so there shouldn’t be much disruption for our cricket members or visitors. However, given what has already gone before, they could prove to be ‘famous last words!’”

Jane Cable

The latest pictures of the construction can be seen here: www.rosebowlplc.com/pages/new-development-images/

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