Grand Opening of new clubhouse at Netley Sailing Club
by Dougal Henshall 3 Sep 2018 17:35 BST
Netley Sailing Club's location, nestled away in a corner of the Royal Victoria Country Park, gives it a wonderfully rural flavour © Mark Cockrill
As anyone who has ever had building work done at home will tell you, no matter how prepared you may be, the weather gods will be watching you from above, waiting for the most awkward moment to send out the worst in rain, wind, rain and wind and if you've really annoyed them, wind and snow! And when the project involves a complete demolition and rebuild that on paper could take the best part of a year, then there is a strong likelihood that you'll get all this and more!
Yet the weather was just one more hurdle facing the membership at Netley Sailing Club, as they contemplated the total rebuild of their clubhouse. For more than 30 years, plans for a new building had been produced, changed, superseded by events, redrawn, only for the whole process to loop around to the beginning for yet another restart. As the years rolled by, the original structure of the club, which had been created by the Army, who used the Royal Engineers to bolt together two unwanted squash courts, demanded more and more in the way of TLC just to keep it standing.
There were two key aspects to the new clubhouse project; the first is common to all builds, in that the cost of the building had to be sustainable looking forward into the future. Nobody at the club wanted to saddle the youth sailors of today with a mountain of debt to be serviced tomorrow. The second aspect was in many ways unique to Netley's location, for not only is their site co-located with a Site of Special Scientific Interest, but it sits within the beautiful grounds of the Royal Victoria Country Park, the last un-commercialised space on the banks of Southampton Water. There was one other complication in that the clubhouse build was seen by the Local Authority as a prestige project, given that it would be highly visible from both the water and the grounds of the park.
Back in 2015, members of Netley Sailing Club set about addressing both these considerations in parallel. Where ever possible, the resources that were available from within the membership were utilised, in both the drawing up of a final set of plans and the raising of the funds that the work would require. Attempts to raise the money through grants were either rejected or came with too many conditions, so the decision was taken to fund the whole project in-house. With the required finances in place, planning permission was granted and as the 2017 sailing season drew to a close, the members who were already fully committed to the project were able to indulge in a night of wanton vandalism, as the interior of the old building was trashed in a way that would have amazed the worst (or best) of 1970s rock bands. The following day, the builders moved in and completed the demolition, taking care at every step to cause nothing in the way of disturbance for the wildlife that was close by.
At first the weather was exceptionally kind to the project, with the early winter months allowing work to race ahead. The new structure was already being already erected when the first warnings of serious change were received on site, with a prediction that a severe storm was on the way Early morning dog walkers in the Park and commuters on the Red Funnel services heading up and down Southampton Water would have seen the building works bathed in the glow of floodlights, as the builders raced to secure their work. Then came the dreaded 'beast from the East', but even though the temperatures had plummeted, work continued apace.
By the time the new sailing season was underway, the outer structure was in place and the building weather proof. Even though club members had to make do with fairly basic changing room conditions, it says so much for the resilience of the membership that the levels of participation during this period stayed at a high level and for some events even increased. Certainly, the weather gods then smiled on Netley, sending the club a brilliant spell of summer weather that saw the final fit out of the interior being completed, mainly by dedicated parties of club members. There are just too many to name names, suffice to say that they all worked together to produce a superb modern, high class, fit for purpose clubhouse that will provide the foundation for Netley Sailing Club to develop and grow on into the future.
With so much work having been done, the official opening of the new building was always going to be an event that would mix the formal ceremonial aspect of the day with that of a fun party. Out of a membership of just over 460 adult members, some 350 tickets were sold for the event, which was scheduled to include two bands, a full-scale BBQ, champagne toasts and the all-important formal ribbon cutting that would declare the club open.
However, having been so kind to the Club during the build, the weather gods then decided that you can have too much of a good thing, serving up an absolute pig of a day for the opening event. It was cold, windy and raining with an intensity that saw localised flooding at the entrance to the Country Park. Luckily there was a Plan B in the organisation and instead of spreading out around the wide balconies that wrap around the main building, everyone crammed inside in the dry to hear the speeches, including a wonderful precis of just how this momentous day had come about from Club Commodore Rosie Parker.
After a final countdown that would have done a start line proud, Jeremy Horsfall, one of the earliest members of the club, whose association with Netley goes back nearly forty years, cut the ribbon and the club was open. As one who remembered well those foundling days of try to get a new club established, not to mention the completion of a clubhouse from scratch, Jeremy was delighted with the quality of the new build and saw it as a fitting tribute to the efforts of the membership. With the speeches over, the kindly weather gods then relented allowing the rain ease off then stop and as the skies cleared, the party atmosphere swung into action in the classic Netley style.
The first big test for the new building would start just days later, with the club full of young sailors taking part in the ever popular Netley Youth Week, which once again was a sell-out. Elsewhere, club members were appearing high up in the results at events both at home and abroad, and with club racing participation on the rise, the new clubhouse looks set to become home to not just a growing fleet of dinghy sailors, but more importantly, happy dinghy sailors, for many years to come. As has been Netley's way in the past, the warmth and fun that is such a part of this club will be extended to the many visiting fleets expected to be sailing from the club in the future.