Barnet: The End of Underhill and a Future Unknown

After one hundred and four years, Barnet Football Club has confirmed its time at Underhill is drawing to a close. A statement released by the club this afternoon pointed to “unresolved ground differences with the council” as the reason it faces “an end to their 100 plus years residence of their spiritual home”. The announcement ends speculation about whether a deal could be struck but raises a far more urgent question: if not Underhill, then where?

For all its finality, the club’s communication is curiously silent on the specifics of a new home. With just over a year until the current arrangements expire, supporters have been left in the dark. Attention naturally turns to The Hive, the club’s forty-four-acre training facility at The Prince Edward Playing Fields (PEPF) in Canons Park, seven miles from Underhill. It has long been suspected that owner Tony Kleanthous wishes to relocate the club there, but the path to doing so is littered with legal and practical obstacles.

A Matter of Principle

The immediate conflict with the local council revolves around two key pieces of land. The first concerns access to Priory Grove, the road behind one of the terraces. According to the Barnet FC Supporters Trust, the council offered the club a vehicular licence for a nominal fee of £10 per year. The club’s position, however, is that it objects to the licence on “the principle and the precedent that this sets”. This is despite the club apparently using the road without issue since a previous licence expired in 2006.

The second, more significant, dispute concerns the lease for the South Underhill land, which expires on Christmas Eve next year. The club sought a ninety-five-year extension, but a disagreement over the land’s valuation has stalled everything. After the council commissioned an independent valuation, which the club disputed, Barnet commissioned its own, which it also found unacceptable. The council then offered a fifteen-year lease, the maximum a court could award in a disputed case, but the club rejected this as offering insufficient long-term security. The situation is complicated further by the club’s unhappiness at being asked to pay a market rate while Saracens RFC are apparently being offered land at the Copthall site for a peppercorn rent, a deal the council says is tied to community use assurances.

The Wealdstone Complication

Even if the issues at Underhill were resolved, a move to The Hive is far from straightforward. The planning permission granted for the PEPF site, which Barnet took over after Wealdstone FC’s development partners collapsed, came with explicit conditions. A document from 2006 confirms covenants were to be put in place “explicitly prohibiting Barnet FC League side from relocating to the PEPF site or holding matches there”. It also stated that Wealdstone FC was to be the only team allowed to use the main stadium.

While it is now claimed the clause relating to Wealdstone’s right to play there has been removed, nothing has appeared in the public domain to confirm this. Wealdstone, who found a new home at Grosvenor Vale in 2008 on a ten-year lease, feel they are entitled to compensation if the rules have been changed to allow Barnet to move in. The club’s chairman, Howard Krais, issued his own statement this evening, noting, “We have never given up our right to have a stadium built on site and although there have not been any recent conversations with Barnet, given previous planning regulations we would have expected to have been advised if things had changed.”

A Year to Find a Home

This leaves Barnet in an unenviable position. The lease at Underhill expires in twelve months, and it is difficult to see how The Hive could be developed to Football League standard in that time. A period of ground-sharing seems almost inevitable.

The options, however, are bleak. Nearby grounds at Boreham Wood, Enfield Town, and St Albans City are not up to league standard. Watford’s Vicarage Road would likely be too expensive, and Stevenage is a considerable distance away. The most practical solution might be Leyton Orient’s Brisbane Road, but at fourteen miles from Barnet, how many supporters would make that journey, and what would the financial impact of lost revenue and rental costs be?

Today’s announcement has confirmed the end of an era at Underhill. Yet for every question it answers, it poses several more about where, and even how, Barnet Football Club will exist this time next year.