The renovation of 30 full size pitches at Chelsea’s 152-acre training facility at Cobham in Surrey has been recently completed by White Horse Contractors with a notable environmental significance.
The pitches used daily by the Premiership club’s first team – 60,000 square metres in all – were Koro’d, replenished with over 1000 tonnes of Fibresand concentrate, then re-seeded in a very tight pre-season timescale by the company based at Abingdon in Oxfordshire. All pitches are replicas of the club’s Stamford Bridge surface and the polypropylene fibre reinforced silica sand fed into the root zone adds stability to a surface created from a Rigby Taylor R14 seed mix.
Other remaining pitches at the Cobham complex, used by the club’s Academy and outside third parties, were sprayed-off, cultivated and laser re-graded. All of the work there started in June and was conducted in two phases.
However, it was neither the time pressure nor the scale of the work that sets this project apart: it was the concerted effort by both the club and contractor to minimize waste and vehicle movements.
White Horse Contractors, which handles a wide variety of natural turf and artificial pitch work countrywide, constructed the first team pitches at Cobham back in 2005 and since then further pitches for the Academy and a 10,000 cubic metre synthetically lined reservoir to help irrigate them. Over this period, with Chelsea’s wholehearted approval and encouragement, they have developed an operational strategy for all renovation work that ensures no material is transported from the site. The resulting reduction in vehicle movements, retention of valuable void space in landfills, minimising waste, and lowering the need for fertiliser are all practical ‘green’ benefits.
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