Having ensured that we will be playing in the SCFL Premier Division next season with our win on the road at Wick FC, we have the welcome news that will be on our way back to our ground at Godstone Road from next season. The first important date is Monday 4 August when the drainage contractors will arrive to commence the works.

For those unfamiliar with the background story to this saga spread over the last two seasons, the drainage project is not being managed by Lingfield FC as the ground is run by the Lingfield Sports Club with ownership of the land lying with Tandridge District Council. The LSC oversees the management of the site under a lease from TDC with a committee formed by members of LFC and Lingfield Cricket Club who both have leases with LSC. The funding for the drainage works has come from the Council as a grant of £211,562 to the LSC from funds generated by the Community Infrastructure Levy. The CIL is a charge that a council may place on a new development or the extension of an existing building that can then be used to improve the infrastructure in the area.

The plan was for the works to be carried out last season while we played our matches at Horley Town's ground but ran into some problems. The Council quite correctly will only make grants for schemes where there is security of tenure so that the works funded will have a long term benefit to the community. This required sorting out a new lease for the LSC before any funds could be made available. The second delay came from the requirement to obtain planning permission for the drainage works. By the time the bureaucracy had been sorted out the football season had ended.

The work was scheduled to begin last September while we had arranged to play our early games at the home of Oakwood FC until the ground was ready for use. Materials were delivered to the site and the we had carried out some works to extract the cables supplying the floodlights in preparation. The contractors were delayed by illness to the project manager and then the rains came. September was unusually wet and the amount of rain, of course, showed up exactly why the drainage work was required. The ground remained too wet for the work to be carried out as it has to be able to support the plant used for the work without leaving deep ruts. Even if had miraculously dried out, the ground temperature would have been too cold for the grass seed to germinate and bind the soil covering the drainage pipes together.

The works will take two weeks to complete and will see a network of main lateral drainage pipes laid across the whole field to take the water to the drainage ditch that exists on the far side of the field from the road. A new pipe opposite the club house will gather the water from some of the lateral pipes and deliver it to the ditch as it flows out of the site into the fishery. A series of small secondary pipes direct the water into the main pipes. A ring main pipe surrounds the cricket square as this will be untouched by the works. The pipe trenches will be backfilled with gravel and a layer of top soil that will then be seeded.

The timeline for the next part of the job is variable as it depends on the weather but is from four to six weeks. Grass requires warmth and moisture to grow as demonstrated by the current lack of energetic grass growth due to the lack of rain recently. Ideally we need to hope that from mid August we get some regular periods of rain stretching through September to make the ground ready for play at some point in early October.

There will be updates on the project in due course and then is a plan attached to this post showing the detail of the work.