For Barnet fans it’s a popular chant: “Underhill, Underhill, We’re the famous Barnet FC and we come from Underhill.”
Except they currently don’t. It was in April 2013 that Barnet Football Club played its final game at Underhill, the place it had called home since 1907, though the club’s roots in the north London borough go back to the 1880s. Since 2013, after protracted disagreements with the council over development plans and no success with agreeing an alternative site, the club has been in exile in Harrow. But a return to its home for more than a century was aways the club’s ambition, and now that just might happen.
The decade away hasn’t been positive for Barnet FC. Football was becoming ever more popular, but attendances at its new ground, the Hive, were falling – down 22 per cent overall compared with their final years at Underhill, with home supporter numbers down almost 30 per cent. The club’s fan base remained in Barnet and wasn’t travelling regularly enough over the borough boundary. Harrow people, it seemed, weren’t interested in the new arrival.
Coupled with lower season ticket sales and sponsorship, that was adding up to losses of a million pounds a year, threatening the club’s very existence, even though it is presently on a winning streak in the National League. “The Hive is a good facility, but it doesn’t have the soul that a stadium based in its community would have,” as one fan said. “The soul of the club is in Barnet.”
Plans for a new £14 million, 7,000-seat stadium on council-owned playing fields to the south of the club’s old site, now replaced by a secondary school, were first outlined by club owner Tony Kleanthous early last year, and an outline planning application has now been submitted. The plan would ensure the club’s future and benefit a community in which Barnet FC has played a central role for generations, the club says.
It’s long been recognised that football clubs play a particular role in their localities. As the previous government’s White Paper on football governance put it: “Unlike typical businesses, football clubs are community assets with cultural heritage value”, not only bringing economic benefits to their areas, but wider benefits too, from neighbourhood facilities to “civic identity and pride in place”. And moving clubs away from their roots, as the experience of Wimbledon relocating to Milton Keynes showed, hasn’t gone well.
There’s a powerful link between club and place, and for Barnet FC and their supporters in the Bring Back Barnet campaign, this cultural significance, for fans but also more widely, is a key argument in favour of the plan. “Football clubs bring people together as part of something bigger, evoking a sense of pride and strengthening community bonds,” the planning application says. Indeed, it argues, the Bring Back Barnet campaign itself, already attracting thousands of supporters, is an example of the “positive impact football can have in energising local people and improving community cohesion”, even with the club still in exile.
There are other arguments too, such as that the new stadium will bring jobs and an overall boost to the local economy. New public health facilities will be provided, the stadium surrounds will be “rewilded”, and there will be opportunities for school nd other groups to use the facility. The site has good public transport links and is already earmarked in the council’s Local Plan for a “destination sports hub”, suggesting, the club says, that the principle of building there has been accepted. No other viable alternative has been identified, they add, despite 51 sites being considered.
A battle is nevertheless brewing – and likely to be as hard-fought as the 1471 Battle of Barnet, a pivotal moment in the Wars of the Roses depicted on the club’s crest – because the club’s proposed site is part of the borough’s Green Belt.
That means persuading the council – and possibly Sir Sadiq Khan and a planning inspector too – that the “very special circumstances” required in national policy to outweigh the harm a Green Belt development would cause exist. Barnet is well blessed with Green Belt – around a third of the borough carries that designation – and while the stadium site makes up just 0.1 per cent of that total, the strict rules still apply.
Might the government’s new policies on “grey belt” land, seen as not strongly contributing to the purposes of the Green Belt even if not previously developed, help the club’s case? It’s certainly a new element, particularly if it can be argued, as the policies state, that there is a “demonstrable unmet need for the type of development proposed”.
A planning decision in next door Enfield taken just last week might also be helpful. Tottenham Hotspur FC’s plan to create a training facility for their women’s squads on a former golf course, part of Enfield’s Green Belt, was deemed to be potentially appropriate because it complied with one of the exceptions to the ‘no building’ rule set out in national planning policy, that being “provision of facilities…including buildings, for outdoor sport”.
As with the Barnet plan, Spurs still needed to show “very special circumstances” justifying a scheme that would impinge on the “openness” of the Green Belt. The need for the facility, the lack of suitable alternatives given the benefits of the specific location, and the environmental improvements proposed were all enough to tip the balance for a majority of Enfield’s planning committee.
In Barnet, opposing forces are now lining up, with a campaign established to “save Barnet playing fields” and objections already being submitted. There’s a long way to go. Meanwhile, on the pitch the team continues to top the National League. What price not only a promotion into League Two, but Barnet FC back in Barnet too, as so many would like to see?
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky. Image from New Underhill campaign.