Wheels ready to spin with Newmarket's £150,000 skate park set to open

Newmarket’s new £150,000 skate park will be up and running by the end of the month marking a triumph for the teenagers who led the project from beginning to end.

The completion of the three-year project to build the state-of-the-art park on the town’s George Lambton playing field has been acknowledged as a great achievement for the group of young people from Newmarket Academy who came up with the plan when the old timber and steel park was closed because of vandalism and ongoing maintenance issues.

After successfully pitching their ideas to Forest Heath councillors in 2017, Academy students Dan Beynon, Leon Trehame, Ethan Eagling and Megan Conti-Lamont set to work the next year to raise the funds to make their dream a reality.

With pledges of £50,000 from West Suffolk Council, £70,000 from Orbit Housing plus sums from Suffolk County Council, Anglian Water and Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin organisation in place, planning permission was obtained and it was all systems go.

The new bespoke skatepark is a free-flowing, all-in-one space with a new bowl feature, which has been contructed to a design developed by the Academy team and has been built and installed by their chosen contractor, the Hampshire-based Gravity Engineering, over the past 12 weeks.

And further good news for skateboarders is that funding is now in place for phase two of the plan which will see lighting and security cameras installed by the end of September, allowing the park to be used during darker evenings.

Academy principal Nick Froy has praised his students for their ‘vision, commitment and resilience’ and Cllr John Griffiths, leader of West Suffolk Council, said: “This is a first for Newmarket with its young people taking such a large-scale project from start to finish. I offer my congratulations to all involved.”