From a certain spot on the terrace top of the Parade Gardens, you can see across the river Avon and right down into The Rec, the ramshackle ground where Bath Rugby play. On match days passers-by will stop to stand and watch, though they can only see half the pitch.
In the city centre, close by Pulteney Bridge, a short walk from the Abbey, The Rec sits in one of the most picturesque settings in all of England. Which is one reason why the club have spent much of the past 20 years wrangling for permission to redevelop the site, because they are so reluctant to give it up. But next April they will do exactly that. On Thursday, Bath confirmed that they are going to decamp to Twickenham for their home game against Leicester. They are calling it “The Clash”, and they hope to sell 50,000 tickets. Tarquin McDonald, the managing director, explained that, aside from the revenue drive, the game is about “reaching out to the wider supporter base” by giving the club’s fans from outside their home town a chance to come and see them play.
More than that, though, it seems to be all part of the Bath’s grand plans for their brand. Their owner, Bruce Craig, wants to turn them into the top team in the country. This is not a one-off. If it goes well, they will do it again for the next four seasons.
There was a time when Bath did not need to go to the bother of rearranging their home games just so they would be sure to get to Twickenham, because most years they would be playing there anyway. In the 1980s and 90s they won 10 cup finals in 12 years.
McDonald admits the reason the club believe they still have enough fans around the country to fill the ground now is the “glow from the 80s and 90s, the legacy of that period”. The last of those cups was won in 1995-96, when Bath did the double, winning their sixth league title in eight years. The next season the game turned professional. They won the Heineken Cup a year later, a last great hurrah.
Since then, however, aside from a victory in the Challenge Cup in 2007‑08, there has not been a whole lot for the fans to celebrate. Craig is determined to change that. He behaves like a man who has never come across a problem he thought money could not fix.
His latest hire is the director of rugby, Todd Blackadder, from the Canterbury Crusaders. And they have started the season well, with victories in their first three fixtures.
The fixture at Twickenham is only one little piece of Craig’s plan. A far larger part is the construction of a new 18,000-seater stadium on the same site, the price starting at £20m. The fans have heard this talk before. The debate about the rights and wrongs of redeveloping The Rec has been rumbling on through the professional era, the city’s own Jarndyce and Jarndyce. When Craig took over in 2010, he said he wanted to have the new ground ready for the 2015 World Cup. He has managed to expand some of the existing stands, but construction of an entirely new stadium has been stymied by the legal arguments, and, most particularly, the objections raised by three individual residents, Jack Sparrow, Rose Carne, and Nigel Websber.
Bath have been playing at The Rec since 1884, but it has never belonged to them. The ground was conveyed to the city in the 1950s and is run as a charitable trust by the council. The terms stipulate that it should be used for games and sports of all sorts, and that none of them should have precedence over the rest. So Bath share it with a hockey, croquet and tennis clubs, and a lacrosse team.
It is, McDonald says, “a dog’s dinner”. The argument has been played out in planning meetings and the letters pages of the local paper, The Bath Chronicle, for more than a decade. There are rival groups on either side, the Friends of the Rec believe that because Bath are a professional club they should not be there at all. The Real Friends of the Rec, on the other hand, have been lobbying for the club to be able to build a new multipurpose sports ground on the site. Outsiders could be forgiven for being reminded of the Monty Python sketch about the People’s Popular Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front.
The hearing next month, which comes at the end of three-year cycle of appeals and appeals-against-appeals, will determine how the land can be used, and, ultimately, whether the club will be allowed to press ahead. McDonald is cautiously optimistic. “The overwhelming majority want it to happen,” he says. “They see it as part of the cultural lifeblood of the city. So it’s not just a museum town, rugby helps keep it alive and fresh.”
If they get the go-ahead, he says, they will look to start construction some time in 2018. Otherwise, the club may start looking for a new site. And wherever that may be, no one will be able to see it from the Parade Gardens.
