SATURDAY marked the 45th anniversary of the opening of Les Quennevais and, while it continues to be an important hub for sport and the community, it is also a timely reminder of the desperate need to provide more and better facilities in the Island.
On a cold and crisp winter’s day, Les Quennevais on Saturday, as it is every week, was full of activity. The early morning park run, three men’s football matches, hockey throughout the day, mums, dads and their children splashing around in the swimming pool, teenagers honing their skills on the skateboard park, father laying up for son under the basketball hoops. There is something for everyone, of all ages, at the sports centre out west.
When it was opened in 1979, Education Committee president Senator Reg Jeune urged people to “use the new facilities to fullest capacity” and, 45 years later, people still do.
But the centre itself is getting a little tired and needs an uplift, while the demand far outweighs supply across the Island, especially in the east but also following the slow “retirement” of Fort Regent.
Working with Jersey Sport, the government announced its Inspiring Active Places strategy in 2021 that would involve huge investment in new or upgraded sports facilities around the Island. But as bold and as ambitious as it claimed to be, many would argue that such investment was long overdue. So imagine everyone’s frustration when the government quickly abandoned the vast majority of that strategy within two years, with it unlikely that much of it will be reconsidered for quite some time.
By the 1970s, the western population had also been waiting a long time for something like Les Quennevais to service their needs. Though it took just over a year to build, at an initial cost of £191,000 (around £1.2 million today), Jeune added: “Since the war many dwellings have been built in St Brelade… and a need for better sports facilities.”
The new centre, though, was only half of what it is today. In fact, it was just a sports hall like any other, with the various coloured lines marked out on the hardwood flooring for badminton, hockey, basketball, netball and volleyball that must have been revolutionary at the time given JEP reporter Suzanne Le Quesne’s comment that it could cause “a possible problem for any colour-blind users” though you could just as well attribute it to the British mentality of trying to find the merest of negatives in an otherwise positive development.
The project itself was an anomaly when it comes to contracting out construction of a government building – it was completed on time.
On opening day, the “practical, no-frills” sports hall showcased the different sports that it would house, including table tennis, badminton, fencing, trampolining and gymnastics. The centre would be used by schools and various sports associations and clubs. Two squash courts and additional changing rooms would be added to the centre, but it wasn’t until 1996 that it would become what it is now, when the indoor swimming pool complex was built and incorporated the sports hall and gymnasium to become a fully publicly accessible leisure centre. A report into Sports Facilities Delivery by Knight, Kavanagh & Page in 2019, commissioned by the government, stated that Les Quennevais was “arguably Jersey’s premier indoor, outdoor, wet and dry sports facility… and would be the envy of many operators in the UK, especially with regard to the range of activities accommodated.”
Knight, Kavanagh & Page would be appointed again to help the government develop the Inspiring Active Places strategy with the only significant developments earmarked for Les Quennevais being a new 3G football pitch and a facility for gymnastics. The rest focused on improving other facilities, such as Springfield, Oakfield and FB Fields, as well as building a much-needed sports centre in the east of the Island at Le Rocquier, especially with the decaying Fort Regent’s exclusion from the strategy, suggesting a repurposing of the historic site. But the project put forward by the previous government that promised so much, was put to an indefinite sleep by the current so-called “Better Way” version led by recently ousted chief minister Kristina Moore. Even the website devoted to the ambitious but crucial strategy to meet the public’s demands for sufficient, modern sporting facilities has been taken down. Sport in the Island is once again in a divesting purgatory because of our policy makers, whose vision appears clouded, just when they had given us some small hope.
