County opens £3.2m indoor cricket school in former tram depot

For 80 years the long brick shed on the edge of Derby housed trams, then buses, then nothing at all. On Saturday morning it housed 40 children from three primary schools, a bowling machine set to a gentle 55mph and a county coach shouting “watch the ball, not the roof” across six lanes of brand new artificial turf.

The county’s new indoor school, converted at a cost of £3.2m from a depot that had stood empty since 2009, is the largest such facility in the east Midlands and the first in the country to be built under a shared-use agreement that guarantees schools and recreational clubs 60% of its available hours. The county’s professional squad will train there on weekday mornings through the winter; the rest of the time it belongs to everyone else.

“Indoor schools have traditionally been places where the first team practise and the public watch through a window,” said Ian Pattinson, the county’s director of cricket. “We’ve turned that round. If this building isn’t full of 11-year-olds on a Tuesday night in January then we’ve failed, and I’ve said that publicly so people can hold me to it.”

The depot’s original iron trusses have been kept, blasted clean and painted a deep green; beneath them the lanes run the full 22 yards plus a bowler’s run-up, with a ceiling height of 11 metres that allows for lofted shots. There is a strength and conditioning room where the inspection pit used to be, a video analysis suite in the former ticket office and a cafe that, in a nod to the building’s past, has a tram destination blind for a menu board.

The project was funded by a £1.5m grant from a sport and heritage fund, £900,000 from the county itself and the remainder from the city council, which owns the building and had failed twice to find a commercial tenant. Councillor Ruth Palfreyman, who leads on leisure, said the authority had been “about six months from demolition” when the county approached it in 2023.

Among the first through the doors were players from Allestree Park CC, a club that lost its own small indoor facility to a leaking roof in 2021 and has since bussed its juniors to Nottingham for winter nets. “We’ve had kids give up because the travel was too much,” said the club’s junior coordinator, Sunil Marwah. “This is 10 minutes away. It changes what we can offer.”

The county also hopes the school will help it address a stubborn weakness in its own pipeline: it has produced only two homegrown international players in 20 years. “You can’t coach talent into existence,” Pattinson said. “But you can stop losing it to bad weather.”