Press Contacts

Benny Hawksbee | benny@hawksbeegardening.com | 07714433196
Caroline Day | carolineblueday@gmail.com | 07779725747

Please use our email guardiansofwhitewebbs@gmail.com for general enquiries.

Update: "Grounds Issued for Guardians of Whitewebbs’ Legal Challenge"

16th September 2025

Thank you again to everyone who has donated towards this CrowdJustice case! We now have over eight hundred backers - which just goes to show the widespread support there is for saving our beautiful park - both locally and further afield.

Photo: Alison Gracie

Thanks to your generosity, we’ve been able to act fast and issue grounds for our judicial review (JR), challenging Enfield Council’s flawed decision to grant planning permission to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club (Spurs).

We’re delighted that our legal battle to save our park has been featured in The Guardian - “New legal challenge to plan for Spurs football academy in London park”! Thank you to Patrick Barkham, for his excellent coverage, as always.

Graphic: Sam Gracie Tillbrook | Photos: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian and Guardians of Whitewebbs

Grounds

For those interested, there are several distinct grounds for our JR, and we are providing a summary of these below. The grounds for challenging planning decisions in a JR are quite narrow - we have to prove Enfield Council acted “irrationally” or “misled” the Planning Committee.

1. The Council breached the Local Government Act 1972 in relation to transparency requirements for committee meetings.

2. The Council materially misled the Planning Committee on the issue of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG).

3. The Council misinterpreted and/or misapplied Development Management Document (DMD) Policy 84, which requires new development within Areas of Special Character (ASC) to preserve and enhance the features and characteristics which are key to maintaining the quality of the ASC.

4. The Council misinterpreted and/or misapplied DMD Policy 44 on conserving and enhancing heritage assets.

5. The Council erred in its consideration of impacts on the openness of the Green Belt.

6. The decision to grant planning permission was tainted by apparent bias or predetermination.

If you would like to compare these grounds to the Planning Officer’s report and planning application, please visit the following links:

1. Officer’s Report for, and minutes of, the committee meeting dated 11th February 2025.

2. Search the planning application’s reference number “24/00987/FUL” into the Council’s web portal.

Timelines

A judicial review is a complex process. One of the immediate steps is to wait to hear, and subsequently review, the Council’s grounds for resisting the claim. Then, we will wait for the Court to decide whether to grant us permission to proceed to a full judicial review hearing. It will grant permission if it agrees we have an “arguable” case. This decision is usually made on the basis of the documents filed with the claim, rather than with a hearing. Timelines are uncertain and dependent on the Court. We may have to wait several months before we get a decision about permission, but we will keep you updated as the case proceeds. Even if we are not granted a substantive hearing, we will still have the opportunity to renew our request for permission with a hearing. We are grateful to be working with amazing lawyers from PILC (Harriet Child) and Landmark Chambers (Alex Shattock and Claudia Hyde).

Update: "We’ve Hit the Target - Now We’re One Step Closer to Saving Whitewebbs!"

20th August 2025

We are blown away by your support for, and donations to, our Crowdjustice fundraiser - we are now able to mount a fresh legal challenge to save Whitewebbs Park! We are challenging Enfield Council’s decision to grant planning permission to THFC. Reading your powerful comments on the CrowdJustice page has been moving and inspiring! We hit our initial target of £20,000 in just ten days! So we want to say:

Thank You!

Thanks to you, this deer's home, and the habitat of so many other species, is closer to being saved:

Legal Update

By way of a brief update, this £20,000 is the minimum we need to proceed, but we encourage you to donate to the stretch target of £30,000 to cover full legal costs.

We have already sent a letter before claim (also known as a letter before action) and we expect Enfield Council to respond to this soon. We will consider its response; then, unless it concedes, we will urgently issue the grounds to the court at the beginning of September. Subsequently, we hope the court will grant us permission to proceed with the case, and we will continue to a full hearing.

Given that most of the legal case must remain confidential, we are unable to share more detailed information until after we issue the grounds to the court (and potentially not until we hear from the judge regarding whether we can proceed). Please note we are working extremely hard in the background with our expert legal team, solicitor Harriet Child (Public Interest Law Centre), and barrister Alex Shattock (Landmark Chambers). We will keep you all informed as we progress with the case.

Photo: Enfield Dispatch

New Enfield Dispatch Article

Thanks to James Cracknell from the Enfield Dispatch for covering our legal challenge fundraiser “Crowdfunder launched to pay for fresh Whitewebbs legal challenge”.

Flyers and Posters

We are also highly thankful to the community for putting up well over 50 posters around the local area and helping to distribute over 3000 flyers to local residents! The flyers have a poster on one side, encouraging people to stick them up in their window. We are so pleased to see many of these in people’s windows - just walk around streets near Hilly Fields to see the kind of support for Whitewebbs on display.

Video

Sam Gracie Tillbrook has put together another video, where members of the community who helped distribute flyers share why they want to save Whitewebbs. You can watch it here.

Collage: Sam Gracie Tillbrook

Video credits: Editing: Sam Gracie Tillbrook |  Music: Avid Beats - PROUD | Featured speakers and filming: Sam Gracie Tillbrook, Tim Dell, Melisa Zulu, Frances Howard, Liam Hannon, Angie Harrington, Brian Armistead

Special Thanks: Poster and flyer designs: Sam Gracie Tillbrook, Alison Gracie, Enfield Dispatch, Colin Pressland. | Everyone who helped flyer: Alison, Andrew, Andrew T., Angie, Brgitta, Brian, Frances, Ian, Jackie, Jenny, John, Jude, Liam, Margaret, Melisa, Nicola, Paul, Ryan, Sam, Sue.

Thanks to Tim Dell, owner of Hanging Around Gallery, for making this display in his shop window!

Social Media

We are also hugely grateful for your shares and support on social media. Please keep posting and sharing, as it all helps our campaign reach more people.

Press Release

7th August 2025

Our park will be lost under concrete unless we act now.

DONATE towards an urgent Judicial Review of Enfield Council’s decision to let Tottenham Hotspur Football Club (Spurs) develop a large area of Whitewebbs Park in Enfield into a private training facility.(i)

A view of the parkland and one of the veteran trees, a Horse Chestnut, that would be lost. Photo: Alison Gracie

Why we need you

In February, Enfield Council’s planning committee resolved to grant planning permission to Spurs to develop Whitewebbs Park for a private sports facility.

Despite hundreds of objections, the Secretary of State decided not to intervene to call-in the decision, and the Mayor of London’s office has now rubber-stamped the application. Final planning permission was granted in July.

But this fight is far from over. We need you for the next stage, to stop the diggers moving in.

Why this matters

White Letter Hairstreak butterfly, in Whitewebbs Park by Colin Pressland. Listed as vulnerable on the GB Red List 2022 and has a conservation status of High Priority, among other protections.(ii)

Naturally regenerated over the last few years, the former golf course area of the park is now abundant with wildlife and home to numerous protected species including Grass Snakes, Great Crested Newts and veteran trees. Green spaces are vital for nature recovery and our well-being. The climate and ecological emergency is getting worse, yet this plan would let Spurs bulldoze 40 acres (the size of over 20 football pitches) and lay thousands of tonnes of concrete and construct ten lifeless football pitches.(iii)

Two-hundred-and-seven trees, including veterans, will be felled (and a further forty “transplanted”).(iv) All within the Green Belt, land that should have been protected by law.

Whitewebbs Oak protest. The felled 500-year old Oak is in the ancient woodland adjacent to the development site. The tree was mysteriously felled by Mitchells & Butlers, a company financially linked with Spurs.(v) Photo: Kitty Clarke

Our community vs women’s sport?

This is about a very wealthy private company taking over a precious park, shutting the public out from and developing land that was bought for the people of Enfield.(vi)

We support women’s football but Spurs already have the pitches they need. They won’t allow women to use their existing seventeen elite pitches (constructed on Enfield’s Green Belt seventeen years ago). Only Manchester City has as many pitches as Spurs and they don’t exclude women. So this new facility is completely unnecessary. It’s just an excuse to take more public land. Spurs will rent the land for £2m over 25 years (£80k pa).(vii) The club has an annual turnover of over £0.5 billion and spends more than £2m on players’ wages every week! (viii)

Spurs’ existing 17-pitch training centre in Enfield. Photo: DJ AUDITS

Claimed public benefits are unlikely to materialise - the local community has had nothing from Spurs except a series of broken promises.(ix) They are also minimal compared to the public having use of the entire park, as it has done since 1931.

We can win

Together we can challenge this! With the Public Interest Law Centre, we have instructed an environmental lawyer (Alex Shattock) from Landmark Chambers. We believe there are strong grounds for challenging Enfield’s flawed decision. PLEASE help FUND our expert legal team to take this action today.

We need to raise £20,000 in this first phase - help us reach our target by donating and sharing with everyone you know.

Photo: Jo Syz

Past Judicial Review

An earlier judicial review, led by Sean Wilkinson in 2024, focused on the legality of Enfield Council’s lease agreement procedures. It did not address the granting of planning permission for Whitewebbs Park. That case does not affect this case because this is being mounted on wholly different grounds relating to a different decision (planning not the lease).

Together we must act

We can’t allow this precedent for the loss of publicly accessible Green Belt. The whole point of the Green Belt is that it is meant to be protected forever. Public parks should be free for all, not enclosed and operated by a private multi-billion pound business.

We won’t allow this privatisation and destruction of our park to proceed unchallenged. The detrimental impacts on the environment, public access, wildlife and the mental and physical health of everyone who uses and cherishes this park cannot be calculated. But you can make a direct impact by donating to our legal case today.

You won’t just help save our park, you will be contributing towards protecting all parks from inappropriate and damaging development of this kind. Any contribution you can make is really appreciated. Thank you!

LET’S SAVE WHITEWEBBS TOGETHER!

Important legal information

Please note: if we raise more money than we need for our legal case, then we will donate these proceeds to similar causes, limited to the protection of public green spaces.

Our legal team at Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) has agreed to act on discounted rates to make this case affordable, so as long as we raise the minimum amount required to protect our legal position, we will be able to take the proceedings forward.

We will take appropriate legal advice to ensure our case continues to have merit as it proceeds, and undertake to update you regularly and transparently throughout.

Further information

Video: Whitewebbs Park - What Tottenham Hotspur and Enfield Council Don’t Want You to Know

Watch here. Graphic: Sam Gracie Tillbrook | Photo (left): Alison Gracie and (right) DJ AUDITS.

(i) Timeline/bullet point history of key campaign events.

(ii) White Letter Hairstreak butterfly: Elm is its habitat, which is where it lays its eggs. The caterpillars eat elm, particularly the flowers. Flowers on elm trees only grow when the tree reaches maturity. Unfortunately, Dutch Elm Disease has severely affected this species. However, Whitewebbs has some large flowering elms, for example one near the veteran ash tree East of the Toby Carvery (see our 18/5/2025 walk video). This particular elm, along with a cluster of others, would be felled by Spurs. Spurs call this cluster "Category U"/not worth retaining, which is clearly false, given such important elms are present within it.

18/5/2025 walk. Photo/video: Sam Gracie Tillbrook

(iii) Construction works: The construction works involved are broken down in this short video: Spurs and Enfield Council Whitewebbs Number Crunching.

Development of Spurs’ existing 17 pitch men’s training ground. Photo: Spurs

To put the devastation the proposals would cause into numbers:

• Loss of circa. 40 acres of rewilded grassland;

• 207 trees felled (40 more transplanted);

• 7000t+ of excavation;

• Nearly 3000t of concrete and metal substructure;

• 11,000t+ of total materials;

• Net total of 9000t+ of carbon emissions

Also see the planning application and “WLC GLA Spreadsheet - Whitewebbs May 2025”.

(iv) Trees earmarked for removal: see part 1 of Spurs’ Arboricultural Impact Assessment (AIA). See the Woodland Trust Ancient Tree Inventory (ATI) for some of the veteran trees that would be felled. Cross reference the AIA and ATI maps with Spurs’ “REVISED:WHITEWEBBS PARK PROPOSED SITE PLAN” to see where the trees are and pitches would be. Please also note that, as set out in Sam Gracie Tillbrook’s January 2025 objection, Spurs has incorrectly categorised multiple high value veteran trees as being “Category U”/not worth retaining, failing to recognise the importance of the habitats on site.

(v) Spurs financial links with Mitchells & Butlers: Joe Lewis, the majority shareholder of ENIC, which is also the majority shareholder of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, has a controlling interest in Mitchells & Butlers through his entity Odyzean Ltd. Spurs has an option to buy the Toby Carvery lease (pg. 177 of this document). The club chairman’s (Daniel Levy) son, Josh Levy, sits on M&B’s board of directors. For a long time, Spurs has been accumulating Green Belt land in north Enfield.

Video: The illegal felling of the Whitewebbs Oak

Photo: Ian Phillips

(vi) Public Trust: The 240 acre park, comprising grassland and ancient woodland, was bought by Middlesex County Council in 1931 for the public. It is Green Belt land held in Public Trust on a lease term of 999 years. The park’s grassland section was used since the 1930s as a public golf course. Enfield Council began a tendering process in 2019 to lease the golf course area. This resulted in THFC being selected as the preferred bidder in 2021. The golf course was formally closed in 2021. The lease stated that if the golf course was to close, it would revert to public use. Since its closure, everyone has continued to freely enjoy beautiful Whitewebbs.

Photo: Margaret

(vii) Lease Agreement: The relevant section of the “Decision to Lease Land at Whitewebbs Park Golf Course” (KD 5607) outlining financial agreement (para. 37) notes: “There will be an upfront investment into the former golf course equivalent to £500k by THL, therefore giving a total financial benefit of £2m to the Council over the term of the lease.”

(viii) THFC finances and wage bill.

(ix) Broken promises: When Spurs built their men’s training facility, it promised an on-site education centre for Enfield children and a nature reserve, both private. It said every child would be able to visit these three times in their school career. Now seventeen years later, many children, like Sam Gracie Tillbrook of the Guardians of Whitewebbs campaign, have turned 18, and nothing has been built yet. In fact Spurs diverted that land for use as a “temporary” football pitch for the women’s team - the original site for the promised nature reserve! This women’s pitch includes a 500-seater spectator stand. The education centre hasn’t been built and the nature reserve, now pushed further along the Green Belt to Dickinson’s Meadow, has only recently been started. As of July 2025, the work on this nature reserve has mainly involved clearing the young woodland, digging a channel to divert the stream and replacing some fence posts. This video created by Sam, “Whitewebbs Park - What Tottenham Hotspur and Enfield Council Don’t Want You to Know”, addresses the misleading claims made by Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and Enfield Council about their proposals to develop Whitewebbs Park.

Legal Challenge Posters

Sam Gracie Tillbrook has made three different posters using images by Colin Pressland and Alison Gracie. You can choose from these to put one up in your window (or feel free to put up all 3)! Just download them here and print them out (if you don’t have a printer, you can visit your local library). Please also encourage your neighbours and friends to do so too.

In the folder, we have included versions of the poster both with and without QR codes and links. The posters without are best to put up in your window, because people won't be able to read the small text or scan the QR codes from a distance. The posters with the QR codes are for putting up around your local area, especially if you have a laminator.

Open Meeting

The Guardians of Whitewebbs organised an open meeting, held on 6th August, in advance of launching the legal challenge. It had a great turn out, with over 80 people attending, and we spoke to many residents about our next steps to Save Whitewebbs. Thank you so much for coming. And we are very grateful to St Luke’s Church for hosting us, and to all who helped organise and publicise the event.

Photo: Kitty Clarke

GOWW Contact

Please contact guardiansofwhitewebbs@gmail.com for more information or if you have any questions.

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