Summer Sports - Cricket A Yorkshireman, who
settled in Kent for cricket reasons (not too many of them!), but Peter
Robinson did just that. Amongst several areas of vigorous involvement he has in the game in the county, he has made his village club a pioneer in matters ‘green’.
It is a project that has a special significance as winter drought takes hold in the South East and water rationing is on the cards.
Neville Johnson went to see Peter at the club’s ground to find out what they have done to head off the problem
“The four-minute shower and waterproof egg timers might sound a joke, but they could soon be a 2012 lifestyle”
ddington, midway between Sevenoaks and Maidstone, is not a large community, but its cricket club, though modest, is a very active one. There are two Saturday and two Sunday sides in the Kent League and Kent Village League, and a myriad of junior matches are held on the ground. In its current form it was started in 1958, when the village acquired a field for recreation purposes, though records show there was a village cricket club dating back three hundred years. Nowadays, there are fifty or sixty playing members. Peter Robinson came to the village in 1968, initially just to play a game of cricket at the invitation of a Loughborough University friend. He was hooked on the village and its cricket, and has stayed there ever since. His house is just yards from the boundary. That’s how close to things he is.
A Peter Robinson 46 PC APRIL/MAY 2012
It is rainwater harvesting that now puts this delightful club on the map, and Peter has been very much the architect of this. All the village’s recreation facilities are on the site, and herein lies the key to the success of what is a first in cricket square maintenance. A pavilion, a village hall, and a groundsman’s ‘hut’, all lined up adjacent to one another, provide the perfect conduit to this simplest of irrigation systems. In other words, there’s lots of roof space to gather what the heavens offer. Defra held a drought summit earlier this year, and has already placed the south east of England officially in a state of drought. Water companies in the
Rain
region are applying for Drought Orders. Groundwater levels, in places, are lower than during the infamous drought of 1976, and soil moisture deficits in the South East and East Anglia already exceed those of February that year, according to the Environment Agency. It has to be serious then, and unlikely to improve as spring arrives and trees and plant life begin to take up more and more of what’s left. The four-minute shower and waterproof egg timers might sound a joke, but they could soon be a 2012 lifestyle.
It was after the 1976 drought that the first dispensation for cricket clubs against Drought Orders came into place. “You were allowed to water for one hour a week, only in the evening,” Peter recalls.
“It was best to do this as soon after your weekend games as possible to give pitches time to recover in time for the next matches. It seemed to get clubs through, but only just.”
As a new serious water shortage looms, the Addington Village Club is ahead of the game and ahead of all other cricket clubs. Things actually got started in 2006 when Peter applied for a grant, on its behalf, from the ECB’s ‘Go Green’ campaign, which encouraged clubs to look to environmentally friendly running cost reduction. The club was already in the middle of planning general facility development, so it was a welcome addition to funding. It was a time of drought too, not as dire as it looks like being this year, but bad enough to be
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