Over a year ago BEES UNITED, the supporter’s trust, announced plans to develop a new stadium for Brentford Football Club (the Club) at a site on Lionel Road, Brentford, which is adjacent to Kew Bridge mainline railway station.

The supporter’s vision is for a community stadium, an integrated transport interchange and commercial enabling development. The stadium would include an NHS health centre, classrooms for after school and adult education and a range of other community facilities and activities.

For the past 18 months the BEES UNITED team have been working hard to turn this vision into a reality. Because of the need for a degree of commercial confidentiality there has been very little public information available on the progress of the project.

So where has it got to?

Doug White, a Brentford fan with extensive experience in the property development world, joined the board of the Club in June 2003. Doug has been actively promoting this scheme and a complementary transport scheme to build a light rapid transit system (LRTS) from Heathrow airport, along the route of the A30 and A4 to Lionel Road. The LRTS project is being developed by a company called Ambersham, which is already developing a similar monorail scheme in Portsmouth.

The facts as they stand at the moment are:

• The Lionel Road site is owned by the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA).
• In 2002 the SRA agreed to sell it to a developer to build industrial warehouses.
• Although this agreement was made well over a year ago the sale has still not happened.
• The team from BEES UNITED and the Club has spoken to the warehouse developer, whose architect confirmed that a football stadium would fit on the site. The developers’ core business is warehouses, it is concentrating on overcoming the practical obstacles to completing the site purchase and it has not yet decided whether or not to back the type of mixed development proposed by BEES UNITED.
• Hounslow Council are very supportive of the BEES UNITED scheme, as are the local MPs, Ann and Alan Keen. A number of government ministers, including Richard Caborn, the Sports Minister, have been briefed on the scheme and are also very supportive.
• BEES UNITED hold regular meetings with Hounslow Council to discuss progress.
• The Council also accompanied the BEES UNITED team to give a presentation to officials in the Mayor of London’s office. As a result of this meeting the Mayor, Ken Livingstone, wrote a letter to Richard Bowker, Chairman of the SRA, expressing his support for BEES UNITED’s mixed development proposals.

Doug White’s original proposals were based on a conceptual plan drawn up by architects Broadway Malyan. This scheme would give over 70,000 square feet of space in the stadium for the use of the Club and related commercial and community facilities to generate non-football revenue.

Bees United have a detailed business plan, which shows that this could provide a viable long term home for the club and deliver important services to the local community, provided the initial cost of building the shell and core of the stadium could be funded by development profits from the associated commercial enabling development on the site.

It is this last key point that Doug White is working hard to solve, by exploring the opportunity to build a profitable mixture of residential, retail, and commercial leisure facilities around the stadium. Doug is talking to other experienced developers who are familiar with such mixed-use schemes, in order to come up with a development plan that meets everyone’s needs.

Progress is slow but this is a major project that can be of strategic importance to West London as well as Brentford Football Club and it is vital that we get it right from the beginning.