By Cara Waters
Sports clubs across the City of Melbourne are cramming onto a diminishing number of sports grounds in the battle for green space amid a booming population.
In the past 20 years Melbourne City Council, whose territory stretches from Flemington to South Yarra, calculates it has lost more than 70 hectares of sports grounds, with local clubs now struggling to accommodate a growing number of participants.
Alec Kahn, match secretary for the Mercantile Cricket Association in Royal Park. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Ground lost includes 34.7 hectares from Royal Park, 32 hectares from Melbourne Park, with most of the area converted to the Tennis Centre and rectangular stadium, and two hectares from Princes Park and the North Melbourne Recreation Reserve.
The North Park Tennis Club, Melbourne University Rugby Club, Youlden Parkville Cricket Club and Melbourne University Football Club are all under pressure to find space for an increasing number of members.
The contest for sports grounds has come to a head in the debate over the draft masterplan for Royal Park, which proposes adding more sports ovals, another tennis court, group activity areas and multipurpose games areas to the park to replace some of the lost sports grounds.
Community groups are concerned these changes will decrease the amount of open space and harm the park’s flora and fauna.
However, the City of Melbourne has warned of a “significant reduction” in the number of outdoor sports grounds across the municipality since 1986, with some sports grounds converted for other park uses, like stormwater detention, while others have been removed to facilitate the redevelopment of the Royal Children’s Hospital and to create grasslands.
“This places a greater strain on existing facilities and makes finding space and investing in new facilities increasingly important to support active and healthy communities,” a briefing paper to the council states.
Alec Kahn is the match secretary for the Mercantile Cricket Association and books grounds for eight cricket clubs that play at Royal Park, which he says is increasingly difficult due to the sport’s popularity with a new wave of younger people living in the city who are keen to play cricket – particularly those from India and Pakistan.
“We’re running out of space, and this obstructionism that we’re seeing from what I’d call the ‘anti- sport’ lobby is is is a real problem,” he said. “We’ve got the council telling us that we’re probably going to lose one ground because they want to get on sports that have got much greater female composition, like touch rugby, for example.”
Kahn said this approach was pitting sports codes against each other.
“We’re getting into this ugly fight over grounds among ourselves, which we don’t think should happen,” he said.
Kahn said the inclusion of new sports grounds in the draft master plan for Royal Park did not go far enough and the grassland circle in the middle of the park could be used for more sports grounds.
The growing pains are only going to increase, with the City of Melbourne estimating its population of 177,000 will increase by a further 114,700 by 2043, taking it to a total of 292,100.
The council has identified a shortfall of 16 Australian rules ovals, two bowling greens, 12 cricket ovals, 16 outdoor netball courts, 14 soccer pitches and 10 tennis courts across the municipality.
Kahn said he was concerned so much pressure was being put on Royal Park when the plans for new areas such as Arden only included one sporting ground of one hectare, which might be just enough for a soccer pitch.
“That’s not enough for a population of 100,000 unless they are all retirees,” he said.
The North Park Tennis club is also under pressure, with the club pushing for an additional tennis court in the draft Royal Park masterplan as its courts are often booked out up to a week in advance.
“We are really overflowing with members at the moment,” club president James Beckett said. “There was a real explosion during COVID for demand for tennis, which is great, and we’re struggling to manage that with just the three courts.”
The Youlden Parkville Cricket Club has played in and around Royal Park since 1875, and club president Paul Sinclair said the City of Melbourne needed to get the plan for Royal Park right, but it also needed to think more broadly about how more green spaces could be created in growing council areas like Arden and the Docklands.
“If 100 years ago, people said, we’re going to build a massive suburb that provide no footy grounds, people would have laughed them out of town,” he said. “Why is that OK to do now? It’s just called good planning, right?”
Sinclair said Royal Park could not carry the whole load of population growth in the City of Melbourne and its demand for sporting facilities.
Ron Jones at the Royal Park grassland circle. He is one of the landscape architects who designed the park masterplan.Credit: Penny Stephens
Landscape architect Ron Jones designed the original Master Plan for Royal Park in 1984 with Brian Stafford and said he was “pretty horrified” by the council’s revised plans for the park.
“With park uses like sport, obviously a lot of the park uses and habitat values are in conflict potentially,” he said. “There’s a balancing act there, and there’s a need to work through that quite carefully.”
Jones said the open space in the park needed to be protected but the City of Melbourne had progressively taken out sport fields from Royal Park to a degree never proposed by the master plan.
“It’s curious that there’s 25 years of decisions to remove sports facilities, and all of a sudden there’s this about-face on that,” he said.
City of Melbourne councillor Gladys Liu declined to comment on whether the council was seeking to add publicly accessible sports grounds to areas other than Royal Park, such as Melbourne Park, and said it was working to maximise the use of existing spaces.
“We’re adapting some sports fields to accommodate multiple codes and upgrading pavilions with gender-neutral facilities to encourage more women and girls to participate,” she said. “We strongly advocate for including recreation facilities in urban renewal projects led by the Victorian government, such as Arden and Fishermans Bend.”
A spokesman for the state government said adding additional sports grounds on council-owned land was a matter for local councils.
He declined to comment on the sports grounds that have been lost from public land controlled by the state.
A spokeswoman for Melbourne & Olympic Parks, an area that the council calculates has lost 30 hectares of sports grounds, said the precinct was a community asset to be enjoyed by all Victorians.
“Melbourne & Olympic Parks actively encourages community use of these facilities, with Gosch’s Paddock, Olympic Park Oval, and Melbourne Park Oval available for public use,” she said. “This is balanced with the training and match requirements of the precinct’s nine professional sporting clubs, who actively contribute to Melbourne’s rich sporting culture.”
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