Last Updated on 27 April 2023
When the AELTC first made their application to turn Wimbledon Park Golf Course into an industrial tennis complex almost two years ago, they provided documents showing the number of lorries required to move spoil off the site. A figure of 2,365 was quoted.
We looked critically at their calculations and found numerous errors. An obvious one was that for every lorry leaving the site full, an empty one had to arrive first. So, to calculate the number of lorry movements immediately doubled their number. Then excavated earth takes up more space because it bulks up. We re-calculated the figures and arrived at almost 21,000 lorry movements needed. We put our figures to the AELTC – you can read that letter here – but never received a substantive reply.
Since then, the AELTC has revised their calculations to around 40,000 lorry movements but we have found further inconsistencies in their figures. So, we have written again, suggesting that a truer figure would be approximately 50,000. You can read our latest letter here.
Whatever the actual number may be, we still do not know over which roads these lorries would be travelling, though we can expect that Wimbledon Village and Southfields would bear the brunt of this inconvenience and that it would last for years.
