Sports Centre To Open In 18 Months

The new uni Sports Centre will be built and opened in mid-2013, after years of fundraising and campaigning.

Building on the West Cambridge site begins within months, and the centre will be available for use by students and the public in the academic year 2013/14.

Concept sketch for the innovative, fin-backed building.

Plans for the centre moved from hope to certainty yesterday, as Cambridge City Council approved the University’s application by a landslide seven votes to one.

Worries from locals and campaigners about the location and design of the building were dismissed as “unfounded” by Councillors.

Planning illustration for the Sports Centre

The centre will eventually include a swimming pool, fitness suite as well as courts for squash, Eton Fives and basketball. At the moment the University does not provide these, leaving many sports societies to use expensive commercial providers.

The £16million building is the first phase of a University Sports Complex with even more extensive facilities. The project as a whole is expected to total £55million.

Begun in 1995, the quest for a Uni-wide sports centre spent years in an administrative no-man’s-land, with slow to non-existent progress.

But since the Hawks Club, made up of sporting Blues and alumni, took charge of the project a year ago, developments have been swift, with the last stage of approval granted today.

“We are really happy that progress is being made with the sport’s centre,” the Hawks committee told The Tab.

“It is something that we are really passionate about and it is great to see all the hard campaigning has paid off.”

The location of the planned sports centre

CUSU President Gerard Tully also welcome the development, telling The Tab “The Sports Centre has been a long time in the making, so this is great news.”

“CUSU have been campaigning on this for so long because it will finally give students here the centralised and modern facilities most other unis take for granted.”

This final development signals the moment when our sportsmen’s and women’s dream of state-of-the-art, University-wide sports facilities will finally become a reality.