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Wimbledon fans, don your whites and get the Pimms flowing – plans to almost triple the size of the tennis championships have officially been given the green light.
The All England Lawn Tennis Ground (AELTG), the organisation behind the annual event, has been given permission from City Hall to expand the site from 41 to 115 hectares with a whopping 38 new courts and an 8,000-seater stadium.
All of those courts will be built on the former site of Wimbledon Park Golf Club, just across the road from the existing Wimbledon grounds. AELTC said that the expansion will ‘deliver one of the greatest sporting transformations for London since 2012’ and will ‘create 27 acres of beautiful new parkland, free for the public to access and enjoy’.
It’s a controversial project, though. The old golf club is split between Merton Council and Wandsworth Council. Merton Council approved the scheme in October last year while Wandsworth refused.
Local campaigners have also tried to resist the project, raising concerns over the 300 trees that will have to be chopped down and its impact on the biodiversity of Wimbledon Park. There are also worries that the construction of the site will undermine the park’s status as ‘Metropolitan Open Land’, which is supposed to protect it from ‘inappropriate development’.
Fleur Anderson, the MP for Putney, said: ‘Local people are the losers in the deal.
‘We knew we had a big fight on our hands to take on Wimbledon and to try to get them to listen but I am just so disappointed that this is going to go ahead. There is going to be such disruption of our very precious green space. But the fight doesn’t end here.’
You can have a look at what the future of Wimbledon Tennis Championships could look like here.
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