8th January 2023

Well, another year has turned and here we are at the start of 2023 with a new year Oasis update.

I reckon it’s fair to say that the Oasis was once Swindon’s pride and joy, If nothing else it attracted visitors from miles around. They came from Oxford, Cheltenham, Bristol – even as far afield as Cardiff.

We took our first 2023 walk around the site today and it’s clear that the neglect of the site by SevenCapital continues. A leading property developer they may – but they sure as hell don’t take care of their assets. If their treatment of the Oasis is anything to go by. It’s criminal.

Where are we then?

• – The levelling up application for funding is due to be decided at the end of January.
• The planning application is also currently in the Council system awaiting a decision
• Sport England are not happy about the proposed plan to remove the sport hall, and neither are we. But we do want to see the Oasis pool and dome restoration work start ASAP.
• We’re waiting on SevenCapital to start their investigation work into the listed concrete dome support structure, and don’t know when this will begin. 

The campaign feels the need to keep the pressure on both Swindon Borough Council and Seven Capital from all angles, as they aren’t good at updating the campaign and the people of Swindon with progress news or information. And that’s an understatement. The communication from the Council is poor and they barely engage. Indeed they’ve received criticised from external sources for their lack of community engagement.

We need the Council to provide timelines and regular updates. For such a major regional landmark, people deserve to have regular Oasis updates.

Please let us know if you have any thoughts or ideas about how we can achieve our goal to get the Oasis back open with continued pressure. We need to keep pushing. We do not want deadlock.

You can contact us via our Facebook page here. And we’re on Twitter here.

Letter writing

If you’ve got time to pen individual letters to the Council, that may help. The C20 Society did some brilliant work for us last year keeping the Oasis in the spotlight. We need things like that to continue forward into 2023.

Meanwhile the SOS campaign team thanks you all for your support – keep it up! We know you care and miss the Oasis and want it back from the amount of messages we get on an almost daily basis.

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Read the rest of our blogs here: https://saveoasisswindon.co.uk/news/