Town have begun demolition work on the former Staples and Better Gym building behind the Sir Alf Ramsey Stand, which the club purchased in October 2021.
The club currently has no hard and fast plans for the land with CEO Mark Ashton telling TWTD in March that that will come into wider discussions with Ipswich Borough Council and other stakeholders regarding the land around the stadium.
"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,” he said.
"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 the 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 land 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.”