Ealing Council Cabinet have approved plans to rebuild Gurnell Leisure Centre with an Olympic-size swimming pool, fitness centre, and affordable housing. 

During a meeting of the cabinet on Wednesday 22nd February, they approved the plans which were outlined last week to knock-down the old Gurnell Leisure Centre and replace it with a new £45 million development, which would involve an Olympic-sized swimming pool, new fitness studio, and a housing development to help offset the cost. 

Ealing Council Leader, Peter Mason, took to Twitter to announce the decision and wrote an extensive thread talking about the reasons behind why the council has pursued this plan for the leisure centre. 

He said: "The current facility is a mess. Poorly designed. Badly built. Dilapidated. Past its useable lifespan. Energy guzzling. Fuelled by gas boilers. Small by today's standards. When you mix chlorine, steel, water and concrete, you wouldn't expect it to last as long as it has. 

"A previous attempt to regenerate it was also a total mess. 17 storey towers, attached to the new leisure centre, that would almost certainly have had to come down in 40 years. Displacing residents and embodying a huge quantity of carbon. 

"Because of the huge impact it would have had, the plans were refused by Ealing's Planning Committee and the Mayor of London. Since I took over in May '21, we've been piloting a new approach to bringing Gurnell back into use in a much better way. 

"We launched a community sounding board comprising users and sports organisations, and we brought in even our most vocal critics, as well as the great architects at Mikhail Riches to do an open book exercise. Develop plans in collaboration, and find the best compromise possible. 

"Detailed assessments were done to work out whether we could keep the building, retrofit it, or build anew.  

"On every bit of objective analysis - unfortunately - the costs and impact are just too high to try and reopen or reuse a building that simply at the end of its life. 

"At a time when leisure centres across the country are closing because of the energy crisis, not only can the New Gurnell cost us a fraction of the price to heat and power, but the carbon footprint can be massively less than reopening old Gurnell. 

"Times are challenging. 12 years of austerity and a year of economic chaos, with interest rates at generational high, and inflation at 10%+, a sustainable mix of facilities, we think, probably looks like this, and comes with an estimated £40m price tag. 

"But, if we're going to do indoors, we also need to do outdoors too, so an extra £5m needs to be set aside for the wider provision of outdoor facilities like pitches, BMX, skatepark and more. That's £45m in total on today's prices. It could be more. It's unlikely less. 

"We'll pay for it by: The income from the Leisure Centre, Funding from sports bodies, Section 106 contributions Mostly we will borrow. But we can't borrow it all. For every pound we borrow, we need to pay it back with interest. 

"When we asked the public back last year how we should pay for it, the highest preference was for a mixed-use development. Followed by borrowing. So, that's exactly what we're going to do. 

"We think the minimum viable development we need to pay for the cost of the leisure centre. We think that's between 200-300 homes. Between 3 and 10 storeys at a maximum, and we need to test these assumptions with the market. 

"At least 35% of them will be affordable homes. But we're also going to see if we can do many more at social & discounted rents, retaining as many of them under our control as we have in other parts of the borough. 

"Fingers crossed, in little over three years, we'll be opening new Gurnell to the public."