Gateshead Leisure centre hope for 2024
After the “grief” suffered in the wake of Gateshead Leisure Centre’s closure, campaigners are hopeful for an invigorating 2024 that can unite their community in joy rather than sadness.
Despite a public backlash, the huge sports centre was shut down by Gateshead Council this summer and now stands empty.
The sight of what was the best-used leisure facility in Gateshead being left boarded-up has become a source of deep despair for many locals – with complaints that its loss has had a severe impact on people who relied on the centre to stay healthy, socialise, and feel connected.
There were hopes that the Alexandra Road site could have opened its doors again before the end of 2023, with community-led organisation Gateshead Active bidding to take the centre off the council’s hands and breathe new life into it.
Those plans have been delayed, with local authority officials not yet ready to sign off on the group’s business plans for what would be a “huge undertaking”.
But there remains confidence from both sides that the proposals will succeed and that the new year will bring better times after the struggles of the last 12 months.
For Layla Barclay, of the Save Leisure Gateshead campaign group, the reopening of the centre would be transformative.
She told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “I think the people of Bensham, and Gateshead, deserve some good news. There have been so many setbacks for the area – the huge impact from the bus strikes recently, we’re still just getting over Covid.
“It would be a huge boost for everyone to have the leisure centre open again. What has been really noticeable for me going to the other leisure centres is that you don’t see people from your local area anymore.
“If I go to Heworth, I don’t meet anyone there – at Gateshead Leisure Centre, I would always see someone I knew or you would just start to recognise people. It makes you realise the importance of community connections and the role that these centres play in that, it is not just about the physical or mental health side of things.
“It is quite hard to put into words what the impact has been, but it has been felt so much. It has been such a loss and there was such an outpouring of grief to it closing. For it to reopen again would be something to really look forward to and for the community to get behind.”
In the days before Christmas, Gateshead Council officially declared the leisure centre surplus to requirements and agreed in principle to the transfer of the asset to Gateshead Active on a 50-year lease.
However, that will not be ratified until the council is fully satisfied with the organisation’s business plan to run the site sustainably.
While supportive of the bid, Layla agreed that suitable “rigour” is needed from the council to ensure that any reopening is not a false dawn.
She said: “We want it to open as quickly as possible, but we also don’t want it to fail – whatever it takes, it has to be sustainable when it opens. You have to have that rigour around the business plan.
“There is a fine line to walk, but hopefully they can find that balance between having enough rigour and sustainability in their plans and also getting it opened quickly.”