“What choice have we? If we don’t get planning permission and if we can’t make peace with the council, we will be evicted and therefore cease to exist as a football club.”
Those were the startling remarks of Lord Westwood, the former chairman of Newcastle United, as the Magpies seriously considered leaving St James’ Park. Only considered might not be the right word. The club were granted planning permission to build a new stadium in Gosforth several decades ago.
The man who delivered the news? Richard Gee, an assistant planning officer at Northumberland County Council, who rushed to personally inform club officials at St James’.
“It was an important document that needed to get to the club as quickly as possible given what was going on at the time,” the 80-year-old told ChronicleLive. “If it had gone ahead, who knows what would have happened?”
Indeed. Newcastle had previously contemplated relocating in 1899 and 1904, but this? This was the closest Newcastle came to actually leaving St James’ after the Magpies identified a 35-acre site off Sandy Lane near Gosforth Racecourse.
As club historian Paul Joannou detailed, in Fortress St James’, the site was inspected, concepts were drawn up for a £1m ‘super stadium’ and, by 1968, the club applied for planning permission through Northumberland County Council, which Gosforth fell under at the time.
Joannou wrote that the plans would have been ‘revolutionary’. The bowl-shaped design was ‘extremely futuristic for the time’ – the historian likened it to a smaller version of the Stadio Olimpico in Rome – and the stadium even featured private boxes, a supporters’ club and a restaurant.
There were obvious challenges surrounding infrastructure and transport, and Gee admitted the ‘car born traffic would have been horrendous’, but, interestingly, there was little opposition.
“It wasn’t really high-profile when the planning application went through,” he remembered. “It didn’t seem to attract much interest.
(Image: Mirrorpix)
“When the planning application went in, it was slightly controversial because it was in the North Tyneside green belt which, in those days, was pretty sacrosanct. There would have been a statutory notice put in either the Chronicle or Journal regarding the planning application and a site notice put up, but I can’t recollect much opposition to it.”
So why did Newcastle look elsewhere? Well, such was the longstanding uncertainty surrounding St James’ at the time, Newcastle missed out on being a host at the 1966 World Cup because the hierarchy could not guarantee organisers that the club would even still possess the ground.
The council wished to turn St James’ into a multi-use sports complex for the wider community, which led to a tense stand-off, but Lord Westwood insisted Newcastle had ‘all the facilities required to run a football club and such items as a swimming pool and badminton facilities were of no interest to them whatsoever’.
Gee suggested Newcastle were holding a ‘gun to the city council’s head’, after decades of ‘nothing happening’, and it was rather telling that the Magpies quietly kept their options open. In fact, Newcastle also commissioned architects Faulkner Brown to develop a masterplan for St James’.
Whether the Gosforth proposal forced Newcastle City Council’s hand, or not, a 99-year lease was ultimately agreed in 1971. The rest, of course, is history.
As the club now weigh up whether to ‘transform’ St James’ or to move ‘not too far away’, Gee has a clear wish as a freeman of the city. “It’s so important to stay in the city,” he added. “It’s a one-club town.”
View news Source: https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/newcastle-uniteds-revolutionary-super-stadium-30951494
