Millbrook’s meadow or a football pitch? The vote is in

Walk Millbrook’s main recreation field on a summer evening and the crowd tells its own story. Dog walkers thread the mown paths through waist-high grass. Children cut across towards the skatepark and the play park. Somewhere in the seed heads a bee is working through the wildflowers the parish has spent a decade encouraging. What happens to that field next has just been put to a vote, and the results are in.

Three ways forward

The field sits on the edge of the village, on the Rame Peninsula a few miles from Torpoint, and Millbrook Parish Council asked residents to choose between three futures for it.

Option A was to leave the field as it is, maintained under the current grass-cutting contract as a mosaic of short and long grass, managed informally to encourage biodiversity and wildlife habitat.

Option B was a partially mowed shared community space on a trial basis, with the council cutting a central 30m by 25m area to around 10cm through the summer for community activities, while the rest stayed as it is.

Option C was to hand a 90m by 50m area to Millbrook Football Club for a one-year trial, with the club cutting and maintaining it to pitch standard for training on Monday and Wednesday evenings between 6.30pm and 8pm, and matches on Sundays between 1pm and 4pm.

How the village voted

📷Credit: Millbrook Parish Council

284 responses were counted across an online Google form and paper copies. Option C, the football club option, took 165 votes, 58.10 per cent of the total. Option A, leaving the field as it is, took 70 votes, 24.65 per cent. Option B, the shared mowed space, took 49 votes, 17.25 per cent.

The council’s validation checks found four duplicate entries and two responses from outside the parish. One parishioner emailed the council office to switch their answer from Option B to Option C after reading the football club’s statement of intent.

A question the village has faced before

📷Credit: Millbrook Parish Council

The field has a longer history than this one consultation. A Deed of Gift signed on 25 October 1990 passed the land to the Trustees of the Millbrook Parish Hall and Playing Fields Committee, and the freehold was registered to Millbrook Parish Council on 5 March 2004.

In 1995, Millbrook Rugby Union Club asked about a pitch on the playing fields, a request that was not taken further. In 2014 and 2015, a proposal for a shared community garden with the group Communities 4 Kids was grant funded and consulted on, before the group found space elsewhere following feedback from residents. The same year, the council backed Get Millbrook Buzzing, a pollinator project encouraging bees, moths and other insects across the meadow.

Millbrook Football Club has raised the question of more land before. The council’s minutes record a presentation from the club’s then chairman, M Pratten, in which councillors considered the club’s request for additional land, weighed against the wish to keep the playing fields open for all and concerns about the depth of topsoil for a new pitch. Councillors asked the football club instead whether it could expand its existing facilities.

A further proposal came to the council’s Asset & Open Spaces Working Group on 2 September 2021, this time for shared use of what the minutes call the dog walker’s field. Cllr Taggart raised a series of objections on record, including that the ground drains poorly and floods over winter, that mowing machinery had previously become bogged down on site, that a toxicity report covered only the main football pitch rather than the proposed area, and that trees planted to screen the clubhouse would need protecting. The working group recommended against the proposal, and the full council agreed unanimously on 21 September 2021 not to accept it, resolving instead to work with the club on alternative options.

What people told the council this time

The consultation drew comments running to dozens of pages. Those in favour of leaving the field alone or only partly mowing it pointed to the wildlife the meadow now supports, the existing football pitch and training area near the tennis courts, and concerns about dog mess being harder to manage on a shared pitch. One respondent cited the Open Spaces Act 1906 and the National Planning Policy Framework’s provisions on Local Green Space designation as reasons to keep the field as public open space.

Those backing the football club’s option pointed to a shortage of pitches for training and junior football on the peninsula, difficulty using the current ground in wet weather, and a wish to see the club’s youth section grow. Several respondents noted that Millbrook Football Club’s constitution requires any profit or surplus income to be reinvested in the club.

Who owns the field, and what happens next

📷Credit: Millbrook Parish Council

Millbrook Parish Council already has a landlord relationship with the football club, which leases the clubhouse, grandstand, car park and main pitch as a tenant. If the council approves Option C for the recreation field, the club’s own statement of intent and a further agreement between the two would still need to be worked out.

The decision goes to the Full Parish Council meeting on 25 August 2026. The current grass-cutting contract, with its wildlife margins along the bramble edge and the New Road fence line, runs until 2028 regardless of what the council decides this month. Whether it sees out that term is now the question hanging over Millbrook’s meadow.

📷Credit: Millbrook Parish Council