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Skatepark trails behind at Cantelowes Gardens
As new football pitch opens, £200,000 track is still incomplete
A £200,000 skateboard park in Camden won’t be finished until October after the Town Hall spent 10 months finding a contractor.
Skateboarders and bikers were looking forward to giving the new facility – the only one of its kind in the borough – a test skate on Saturday, when Cantelowes Gardens in Camden Road unveils its new football pitch.
But they will have to wait until mid-July for the first-third of the skatepark, called the ‘street area’ to open with the remainder expected to be completed in October – missing the crucial summer holidays.
Work on the £200,000 track started yesterday (Wednesday) but Rob Cole, a BMX biker who made design suggestions on the track, said the council should have “got its skates on” much earlier.
Skateboard enthusiasts are also unhappy, with some posting complaints on the Cantelocals website – www.cantelowesskatepark.co.uk.
‘Wiggy’ wrote: “The real story here is Camden Council being useless yet again. They started out with good intentions and have canvassed views from lots of regular park users.
“They’ve had an enormous amount of input on design and, vitally, on which specialist contractor to use but they seem to have taken ages making any decisions on the contractor.”
A council press official explained on Tuesday how the Town Hall had fallen months behind.
She said: “We started talking to American contractors in August. By November we knew it wasn’t going to work with them. In December we designed the skateboard park ourselves, with consultation from users – the Cantelocals – and went to UK contractors asking if they could build it.
“Between January and February we sent out the design for tender, which takes four weeks, but in March we had to redesign it to scale down costs when the tenders came back as double our budget.
“In April we spoke to contractors building the park’s pavillion asking if they could help us find a specialist contractor. They came back with Wheelscape. We got them on board at the end of May.”
She added: “It seems to take longer than you would think for all this detail to come together.”
Cantelowes Gardens were awarded a £1.5 million grant in 2004. A new football pitch and pavillion will be unveiled on Saturday. |
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