Opinion: New padel club plans at Braywick incomparable to football club proposals

There has been chatter on these pages in recent weeks about the possibility of padel tennis being introduced at Braywick and it appears that some of the natives are restless.

A fortnight ago Jon Reekie asked: “what is the difference between disposal of land for a padel tennis club and a football club?”

In short: about eight or nine acres Jon. He suggested that the answer may be due to a change in who is running RBWM, which is absolutely right.

As he said, one idea (the football stadium) was agreed by the Conservatives and the other (padel tennis) by the Liberal Democrats (LDs). That’s politics. Can you imagine a newly elected Labour government honouring all the policies already put in motion by the Tories?

It is more complex than that. The padel tennis proposal will take up a small fraction of the football stadium space and will be built on a brownfield site, taking over the empty SportsAble site.

The football ground would require nine acres of green space, so it isn’t really a like-for-like argument. Ed Wilson continued to bang this drum last week, but the political changes at the town hall seem to have passed him by.

He suggested that LD leader Simon Werner reneged on the football stadium deal ‘as he wants to protect every inch of green space’, but suggested it was paradoxical that ‘the same administration has put in an application to build 1,500 properties on Maidenhead Golf Course…’.

Er, no Mr Wilson. The LD’s, like most of the rest of Maidenhead, are apparently united in horror at this environmental terrorism. This ‘let’s build properties rather than trust’ was the mantra of the flawed Dudley/Johnson regimes.

Surely he isn’t arguing they are the same as they are both called RBWM? Again, this is like saying ruling Conservatives are the same as Labour being in power as they are both called ‘the Government’.

The bottom line is that each proposal has to be considered on its own merits, rather than drawing unhelpful parallels. If there was a scout hut at Braywick which RBWM allowed a couple of ping pong tables to go into, would that mean that a table tennis club was given preference over the football club?

Of course not. It would be an overly simplistic and spurious argument to make. As a former season ticket holder I am a big fan of Maidenhead United and want what is best for them – but also what is best for the town.

In all this discussion little attention seems to have been given to the question: what will the York Road site be used for if they vacate it? If it means yet more high rise flats then perhaps the status quo is preferable.

Is the Braywick site appropriate for Saturdays when our rugby and football clubs may both play at home? It isn’t even as if they would exist in perfect harmony, given the local short-sightedness and parochialism of the rugby club.

The padel tennis initiative seems like a sensible use of an existing site, which SportsAble vacated in 2021. It is a fast growing sport and a court is only about half of the size of a lawn tennis court. They can therefore be covered quite easily, so are usable all year round.

It would also bring money to RBWM, but obviously not as much as the £460,000 the football club would bring. But some things are more important than money and the building on Braywick is seen by the council as revenue better not to receive, as our town’s ‘lung’ provided by the Golf Course seems destined for a bout of pneumonia.

I have wondered over the years ‘what if Simon Dudley had been a Maidenhead golfer?’ surely he wouldn’t have dreamt of concreting over fairways and greens and destroying trees and habitats.

Without his support, quite simply, this development would never have happened.

Finally we could do with one more venue to be arranged for two protagonists to go to battle.

If someone could host James Aidan and DR Cooper, so once and for all, they can spend an evening of tit-for-tat points scoring and carping about Brexit, nearly eight years after the vote.