They are the greenest football club in the world, famous for giving their players a vegan diet and recycling their rainwater. But now Forest Green’s plans for an even more eco-friendly future have come unstuck, thanks to that most familiar of reactionary forces – the local parish council.
Plans for a new 5,000-seat stadium, made entirely from wood, have been rejected at the last moment after concerns were raised this week by Eastington Parish Council. Now the club, which finished in the League Two play-off positions this year but were knocked out by Tranmere, will have to decide whether to appeal against the decision with the Forest Green chairman, Dale Vince, calling the outcome “a poor show”.
Vince told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “I am a little bit disappointed about what happened. It is a poor show. Four years of work have gone into this, and the council has spent a lot of time and money doing this job properly.
“It was properly assessed, recommended for approval. They are on weak ground and maybe we will appeal but that is another year of my life. The fans will be disappointed and devastated. If you go around the district of Stroud there will be a lot of people disappointed.”
The stadium project had originally been recommended by Stroud District Council but Eastington Parish Council, covering the area surrounding junction 13 of the M5 and the site of the proposed ground, raised several objections at a meeting on 10 June, including complaints about possible noise from the ground and landscaping which would “detract from the visual appearance of the access to Stroud”.
In a final meeting of Stroud District Council on Wednesday night, a motion to approve the stadium was rejected, and a motion to reject the stadium approved.
“I think it is stunning but we need to balance the benefits of that development against the potential costs,” said one councillor, Hayden Jones. “On balance I thought it had greater costs than benefits to the local community and road network.”
The planned Eco Park stadium had been designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and promised a state‑of‑the‑art construction “combining the latest material research and construction techniques with new design approaches to build a more ecologically sustainable and inclusive architecture”.
The wooden structure would have been the first of its kind and was chosen by Vince in part for its low carbon footprint. “The importance of wood is not only that it’s naturally occurring, it has very low embodied carbon – about as low as it gets for a building material,” he said when the designs were announced.
