Campaigners from Save Wimbledon Park demonstrating outside the Royal Courts of Justice ahead of legal challenge against the Greater London Authority over its decision to approve proposals to expand the Wimbledon tennis site.
00:00Hundreds and hundreds of trees are going to have to come down because they're going to have to flatten the land, because they can't play tennis uphill. So it's just absurd, the scale of it. And really, where they float lots of spurious reasons why they're doing it, the real reason is the club just wants to triple the size of the current Wimbledon tennis estate so that they can bring in more visitors and make a very rich private members club even richer.
00:28The expansion proposals submitted by the All England Club would see construction of 38 new tennis courts and an 8000 seat stadium on the grounds of the former Wimbledon Park golf club, allowing it to host Wimbledon qualifiers on site.
00:51Save Wimbledon Park, also known as SWP, previously took legal action against the Greater London Authority over its 2024 decision to grant planning permission for the expansion.
01:06But Mr Justice Signee dismissed the challenge last month. On Friday, SWP said that it had asked the Court of Appeal for the green light to challenge the High Court's ruling, a decision it said it had not taken likely.
01:25Barristers for SWP told the High Court at a two-day hearing in early July that the decision to approve the plans was irrational and should be quashed.
01:38They claimed that Wimbledon Park, a Grade 2 listed heritage site partly designed by Lancelot Brown, was covered by trusts and covenants governing how it could be used.
01:53I don't know. I mean, it'll put massive pressure on the infrastructure, particularly if the stadium is used intensively for events other than the tennis fortnight.
02:03I worry just as much about the human costs. I mean, the levels of dust, you know, the extra hospitalisations from people with asthma, the traffic chaos that will stop people going to work, getting to work, make everyone, they're going to make everyone's lives a misery, basically, for 10 years.
02:23Just so they say, oh, we need it to stay at the pinnacle of the world tennis. That's nonsense. They're at the pinnacle. The place is assured.
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