Planners urge councillors to back scheme for youth club

Aug 11 2003 By Jane Yelland, The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

COUNCILLORS are to decide the fate of a proposed community and sports centre in Mirfield later this week.

Plans for the new development, on the site of the Gilder Hall Youth Club, will be discussed by a Kirklees Council planning sub-committee on Thursday.

And planning officials are recommending that the plans be approved.

A building and surrounding field were left in trust to the youth of Mirfield in 1923.

But the club was taken over by Kirklees when the trust ran out. The club fell into decay and has been empty for some time.

Mirfield-born Hollywood star Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the cult TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation and in movies, returned to his roots this year to raise funds for the project to develop the site for community use.

He got a taste for acting at Gilder Hall, with a drama club there in the 1950s.

But the site, on Greenside Road, was earmarked for housing by Kirklees Council in its planning blueprint the Unitary Development Plan.

And planners say in a report that the community building would be contrary to the UDP.

The outline planning application involves pulling down the building and putting up another.

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