CEO Mark Ashton says Town will be working on a masterplan for the long-term development of the area around Portman Road with the council and other stakeholders, while the new turnstiles behind the Sir Alf Ramsey Stand are set to open at the Wycombe match on Good Friday and the former Staples and Better Gym building will be demolished in the next few weeks.
Building work on the new turnstiles has been ongoing for the last couple of months and is now close to completion.
"I think the Wycombe game is the planned D-Day for it. I think they’re more or less into snagging works now,” Ashton told TWTD as part of a lengthy interview we've been running in a number of parts since the end of last week.
"I spoke to [chief financial officer] Tom [Ball] and the ops team on Wednesday. It’s all coming on. The challenge with Portman Road, as I’ve said before, is that nothing’s ever straightforward because everything’s been built on top [of other things], you peel back the layers of the onion and you keep finding things.
"I think that will make a difference. I’ve not got the date in my head, but in the next four to five weeks, the Staples [later Office Outlet] building will come down.
"We’ll put a hoarding around that for now and then we’re working through with the local authority on the master planning for the development of Portman Road, what they’re looking to do, what we’re looking to do, whether that’s car parking etc.
"We’ve got a number of options on that, we’re working through that with our American property partners and [Ipswich Borough] Council, but it should be down I would think in the next four or five weeks.”
The American property partners Ashton refers to are the club’s US owners: "The board, basically. We’ve got different expertise on the board. If you look at Ed Schwartz and ORG, they do a lot of property work, they’ve got contacts everywhere, which is great because we get to tap into them and use that expertise that I wouldn’t normally get around me.
"Whether that’s property, whether that’s stadium work, whether that’s other bits and pieces, it’s great because you can just tap into their knowledge base.”
Ashton says there are as yet no specific plans for the Staples land, which the club purchased in October 2021, with the club set to meet with IBC and other stakeholders regarding wider plans for the area around the stadium.
"At the moment, it’s undecided,” he said. "The reason for that is we want to look at the whole area that surrounds Portman Road, including stuff that doesn’t belong to the club.
"That’s why we’re talking to the council about what their plans are. We talked about Rhode Island, I think it’s fair to say that some of the areas in and around the stadium need regeneration.
"Can the football club, the council and the local authority work in partnership to regenerate this area around the football club so it works so we open the football club, we open up the pathway into the train station better?
"So we look at transport to the stadium, we look at parking around the stadium, we look at what the council want to do on the Portman Road site because we’ve got to make sure we’ve got access and egress.
"We’ve got to make sure that the club is protected in that there will come a point in time when we’re going to want to potentially replace the Cobbold Stand.
"Having done this at previous clubs, what we’ve got to make sure is that we understand the footprint for that stand, so that something doesn’t get built right directly behind it which prevents us at any point in time building back across, cantilevering etc. It brings all of those pieces of land into play.
"I wouldn’t say we’re right at the start, we’re fairly near the start but we’ve had some really productive conversations with the authority about how we can work in partnership.”
Last year, IBC announced plans to build a new aquatics centre on the Portman Road car park.
The Cobbold Stand is now 52 years old and has long been pencilled in for replacement. Ashton has previously suggested this wouldn’t be something which happens with in the next couple of years. Is that still the case?
"It would depend on what we would put in it,” he said. "If you’re replacing the Cobbold Stand with bums on seats, there’s no economic return really unless you’re in the Premier League.
"However, if you’re rebuilding the Cobbold Stand and you’re putting non-matchday facilities in there that drive revenue 365 days a year, then the dynamic starts to change.
"We’re thinking about all of that at the moment. If we could close our eyes and we were 10 years on, what would the stadium look like? What would the East Stand look like, the West Stand, the North, what would we do?
"I’d like to have an overall completed plan that you could pick and mix and you could build on the way through, but knowing what your end goal is.
"I think if you don’t have an end goal, it’s dangerous, because that’s when you get to a point where you go, ‘Where do the away fans go? Where do the disabled fans go? We can’t get concerts in the stadium’.
"And that’s why I think the football club has to work in partnership with the stakeholders, we have to work in partnership with the council, but I think we also have to work in partnership with the local business community, hence why we’re building a really good relationship with the Chamber of Commerce. We’ve built a really good relationship with Ipswich Central, all from the business community.
"There’s an old Deloitte & Touche report flying around that talks about the economic impact of the football club in the Premier League to the local community and I think that’s absolutely true.
"The town will have more revenue, more tourism, more transport, more things going on, if they’ve got a Premier League football club.
"It’s happening here now. If you talk to the bar holders on the Waterfront about matchday and ask them to look at their revenue now through this football club under this ownership’s tenure, I’m telling you it’s substantially increased from what it was before.
"Go and walk that Waterfront on a matchday. Walk the town on a matchday, 28,000, 29,000 people and at most games that’s primarily home fans - 27,000 here for Shrewsbury! That’s not being disrespectful to Shrewsbury but you’re talking about hundreds of Shrewsbury fans, not thousands.
"So it’s the Suffolk community coming out and when they’re spending money, whether they’re spending that in the shops, whether they’re spending that in the pubs, whether they’re spending it on transport, whether they’re spending it in the coffee shops, whether they’re spending it in the football club, it’s driving the local economy.
"That’s why I think the relationship between the club and its stakeholders is key. I don’t want to build something that doesn’t work because the council are going to build the opposite next to it or it’s not going to work because the business community was planning something else.
"We’re a town centre club, 200 yards from its local train station, an hour into London, we’re at the hub of the business community here and I think we have a role to plan in regenerating the area.”
Unlike the previous regime, Ashton says Gamechanger 20 has no plans to try to buy the land on which the stadium stands.
The Blues signed a lease on the eight-and-a-half acre site which is owned by IBC in August 2001, the term lasting for 125 years from June 1969, the date of the start of an earlier agreement.
"Not Portman Road, definitely not Portman Road,” Ashton said. "I don’t see the benefit in that because we’re not going to move it. If we wanted to move the stadium, that’s what you would do.
"The whole land all around the stadium is a different type of discussion at the moment because that sits with certain members of the board who are helping on what we may or may not want to put with the local authority around the stadium that supports the stadium, that supports the business.”
So that means the club could look to buy the practice pitch? "It could do. But we’re talking [more widely] here, all the way round, we want to look at the whole flow around the stadium. I don’t see the need to acquire the freehold of the stadium. I don’t see the benefit.”