By Mike
December 3 2005

Gravesend & Northfleet have announced that The Plough End is to have 500 seats put in, now the club has secured a 20 year lease at Stonebridge Road.

Gravesend & Northfleet Plough End will now be open fully once plans for 500 seats to be put in gets the go ahead. This week the club secured a 20 year lease on Stonebridge Road with free rent.

 

This is what Fleet chairman had to say to the club’s official website www.gnfc.co.uk :

 

Chairman, Brian Kilcullen, commented “this whole saga with the Northfleet End has given us nothing but problems. In an ideal world we would have just re-terraced the whole area and got it back to the way it used to be. However, under the current regulations regarding grounds it is not possible. The best we could have done is open half of it and now we have run into further problems. Whilst we have plans to move to a new stadium as soon as possible, we may still be here for a few more years yet and want the ground to be fully functional”.

Kilcullen added “The Football Stadia Improvement Fund has supported our proposal at 50% of the cost and we would very much like to thank then for their invaluable support on this project”.

He further commented “I’m sure many fans will be disappointed if we have seats rather than a terrace behind the goal but we have no option. I personally often stood behind that goal because I enjoyed the atmosphere and am disappointed it has come to this”.

There are, however, some side benefits from the club having to follow the seating route. They need to have an additional 500 seats under cover at some stage to meet the necessary criteria going forward. The terrace on the Stonebridge Road side could have been used but that would mean the far larger cost of putting seats there and still having to re-terrace half of the Northfleet End, plus deal with the expense of the stanchion risk. It is a similar case, if they were to put a roof and seats at the Swanscombe End.

Brian Kilcullen confirmed there are some side benefits “we need 1,000 seats under cover to be able to meet the criteria for the Football League should we be lucky enough to get promoted. We also want the ground to meet LDV Trophy status in case we finish in the top 12 this season. Installing these seats now means we won’t have that additional requirement further down the line”.

THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT, THE FUTURE LOOKS RED & WHITE!!