No historic charter in place to prevent Peterborough Regional Pool being built on car park

Last week the Peterborough Telegraph revealed plans to demolish the current Regional Pool building, with a preferred site being named as the Pleasure Fair Meadow car park on Oundle Road.

MORE: Plans to build new Regional Swimming Pool on new Peterborough site revealed

A number of readers contacted the PT, saying they had heard there was an order in place, dating back hundreds of years, which would prevent the site being built on so it could hold a fair.

However, a Peterborough City Council spokeswoman said: “In looking at the potential for building a new pool and leisure centre on the Fair Meadows site both the Council and PIP have taken extensive legal advice including using academic researchers to establish how the charter rights had evolved between the time of their grant (which is many centuries ago) and today.

“This is a complex area. A fair charter is vested in a body (often historically a church body like an Abbey, but now in modern times more often a council). These charter rights allow that body to have control over how fairs and markets are run in an area, often naming specific dates that they should take place on. Generally, they are not location-specific, and they grant the holder of the charter (now the council) the right to hold the events widely within the city.

“We are satisfied that the charters in question do not prevent the Council choosing to support other locations for fairs other than Fair Meadows, and this then allows us to develop on the Fair Meadows location. It should be noted that Fair Meadows has now been a long-allocated development site in the Council’s adopted local plan, so progressing for development is not a new concept.

“To ensure the continuation of a fair in Peterborough we are committed to providing a suitable area of hard standing on the Embankment and this is being addressed through the work we have commissioned for the master planning of that area.”