WAVERLEY Council's executive is to recommend that the council presses ahead with a planning application to relocate the Brightwell Tennis Club at the Riverside when it is displaced by the East Street redevelopment. A proposal by Waverley officers, that work should be suspended on the Riverside proposals and further investigations should be carried out about the possibility of relocating the courts to a reclaimed tip in Weydon Lane, received the thumbs down on Tuesday. Richard Gates, chairman of the council's corporate overview and scrutiny committee, told the executive that the report before them did not convey strongly enough the committee's feeling on the matter. "We could find no merit in examining other sites such as Weydon Lane," he said, adding that the committee had been "strongly of the opinion that we should stop studying things and actually do something". Both sites involve contaminated land and Mr Gates pointed out that the cost of both options would be the same, taking into account the money that will have to be spent on mitigating pollution at the Riverside anyway. East Street portfolio holder Chris Mansell commented: "The question that needs answering is which site is more manageable from a contamination mitigation point of view, and from what I have heard, the Riverside is the easier." The Riverside site carries the risk of flooding, but Mr Mansell drew a parallel with the proposal to locate an Olympic stadium in the Lower Lee Valley. "It should not be beyond the wit of engineers to get this right," he said.
