Greenwich Council has confirmed that the Waterfront Leisure Centre in Woolwich will be knocked down and sold for housing after it closes.
The centre, which opened in 1988, will be replaced in the coming weeks by the new Woolwich Waves complex facing General Gordon Square. The new leisure centre is due to open next month.
The Waterfront site has long been earmarked for development, with Berkeley Homes – which has already built flats on the leisure centre’s old car park to accompany its Royal Arsenal development – seen as the most likely company to take the site on. However, no developer is named in papers to go before the council’s cabinet next week.
Councillors will be asked to approve an outright sale of the site, next to the Woolwich Ferry, along with selling the land to the unnamed “residential developer partner” and entering into a development agreement, which would give the council some say in the design of the new scheme.
Options for entering into a joint venture with a developer, or the council building on the site itself, are rejected.
The paper warns that some disruption to the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, which is behind the Waterfront, is expected during demolition. However, a developer would be able to make a more prominent feature of the tunnel’s rotunda, which was once a local landmark but was hidden by the centre.
What is unclear is whether the council will stick to its own planning brief published in 2012, which suggested extending Hare Street to the riverside – restoring the street pattern before the Woolwich Ferry terminal moved in the 1960s – to open up the view of the Thames and building homes, shops and restaurants along the new street. It also suggests alterations to Woolwich High Street, currently a forbidding dual carriageway.
Councillors will discuss the plans next Wednesday.
The Waterfront was built on land that was cleared following the closure of the old Woolwich Ferry terminal in 1966, with its car park on the site of Woolwich Power Station, which shut down in 1978. The foot tunnel and the power station’s coaling jetty are all that remains of the old riverside site.
Woolwich’s original swimming pool, in Bathway, behind the town hall, is still standing and will outlive the Waterfront. It became the University of Greenwich’s student union but is now the Bathway Theatre, home to its drama department.
With Woolwich Waves due to open next month, revised plans for the residential development behind the new leisure centre are to go before the council’s planning board next week.
Five residential blocks of up to 19 storeys, containing 482 homes, were approved three years ago. The revised scheme increases heights to 21 storeys and bumps the number of homes up to 557.
While the scheme was to include a small number of council homes, just over a third of the homes in the revised project will be for social rent via a housing association, while nearly half will be for private rent, with the rest put on sale. The facade of The Bull pub, which was due to be retained in the original scheme, will be demolished. That decision will be made on Tuesday.
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