ONE of England’s prettiest cricket grounds is at the centre of Britain’s energy debate after a gas-drilling company applied for planning permission to build a test rig near the site of Albury Heath.
Albury Cricket Club, who can trace their inaugural match back to 1765, have until tomorrow to rally objections to the plan by Star Energy to sink an appraisal well on neighbouring land leased from the trustees of the Albury Estate, which is owned by the Duke of Northumberland.
The former Surrey Championship club have written to Surrey County Council to raise health and safety issues related to construction vehicles accessing the exploration site via a road that runs down the side of a cricket pitch used regularly by their burgeoning youth contingent.
“Children and 40-tonne trucks do not mix terribly well,” Drew Nicholson, the club chairman, said. “We now have 120 junior cricketers playing every week and 150 footballers in the winter and we feel it will ruin the ground and its ambience.”
Albury CC fear that the plan would drive away members, whose numbers have grown from 22 to 650 in the past three years. The club, whose old boys include Luke Jones, the captain of London Welsh, and Robin Martin-Jenkins, the Sussex all-rounder, only broke even last season.
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Star Energy, which has operated a small extraction site at Albury since 1987, denied that its plans would disrupt local people, with testing scheduled for only 90 days. Furthermore, it has government policy on its side after concern that Britain will have to import half of its gas by the end of this decade because of a decline in indigenous reserves.