Sunday, June 24, 2007

Autumn Missery for Memorial Stadium Area

Whaddon Road Stadium


Because the Rovers are hoping to begin redeveloping the Memorial Stadium in January 2008, they plan to use Cheltenham City's Whaddon Road Stadium for "home" games for the remainder of the 2007/08 season.

Cheltenham chairman Paul Baker told the Evening Post: "The Football League have accommodated the request not to play the higher-profile games here."

This presumably was a condition of the Rovers being allowed to share the ground. But surely the stadium would want the publicity and revenue that comes with high-profile sell-out matches, unless of course these also bring trouble and violence.

One high-profile match that has been scheduled for Whadden Road is the Rovers' home match against Swindon. Again Paul Baker said "We will be asking Rovers to move it or switch the home and away games around."

What this means is that the most disruptive matches will all be scheduled at the Memorial Stadium this autumn. If the Swindon away and home clashes are switched then we can look forward to large numbers of riot police on 24 November 2007.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Complaint Document Goes to Ombudsman

Arial view of proposed stadium

In March 2007 HorfieldROSE made a formal complaint to Bristol City Council including 44 individual complaints.

Download Complaints Document as a PDF (acrobat) file

The council requested an extension to the statutory period they have to respond to complaints but even then the council's legal team failed to respond within the extended period.

The next step involves taking the complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman which has been done.

We will keep you posted on further developments.