FOREST Green Rovers have unveiled plans for a revolutionary environmentally-friendly stadium – built entirely from wood!
And should they get the go-ahead, ambitious chairman Dale Vince wants to be a home fit for hosting Championship football.
The National League club’s proposed 5,000-capacity home, near junction 13 of the M5 in Gloucestershire, has been given the green light by Stroud District Council after a decade of fine-tuning from Vince’s own Ecotricity Group Limited.
Eco Park plans underway
A world’s first, the state-of-the-art stadium will be made almost entirely from wood – nature’s original renewable building material – and will offer every fan an unrivalled view of the action.
The club say it has been designed with climate change in mind and “integrates measures of energy efficiency and resilience against extreme weather conditions”.
Vince said: “The studies that we did for the entire concept of Eco Park, which is a 4,000 job green tech business park and the stadium and some other things will have a 20% biodiversity boost compared to today’s farming background level.
“Most people think when you’re building something, you’re harming nature, but it doesn’t have to be that way and we will prove that when we build this. And in our studies we’ve proven on the desktop and we’ll prove it in the real world when we get the chance.
“Our goal is to get to the Championship. So the new stadium is a part of that.
“If you look at our current situation, we’re constrained in terms of access, parking, power and water. On matchdays we have problems with all of those things and the new place is super accessible from the A419, the M5, and from all around the county.
“That would help us grow our crowd as we grow as a club to be a Championship football club.”
The proposals will also see The New Lawn, Forest Green’s current home in Nailsworth and base since 2006, demolished to make way for 95 new homes.
