Hull Vikings - A team without a home - kept alive by its fans

Hull Vikings speedway club, who operated out of Craven Park from 1995 to 2005, will not be making a return to the track in the forseeable future.

Prospective promoter Dave Peet said, “Over the last three years, since the club was at Craven Park, we have been actively seeking an alternative venue to resurrect the Vikings on a permanent and sustainable basis. To that end, we have developed a community strategy to link a prospective speedway stadium to a number of local community initiatives, and positive contacts have been forged with a number of Council departments, together with the Police and other external agencies.

However, since 2005, we have looked at numerous possible sites both within the Hull City boundary, and in the wider East Riding area, and in each case, the land has either not been available to acquire, or we have been told by the planners that planning permission would not be granted.

The best option, from speedway’s point of view would have been the site alongside the A63 at the rear of the Makro store, but that site is privately owned by two separate property developers. To acquire sufficient land to build a speedway stadium and car park would have entailed doing a deal with both property developers, who were only interested in a sale rather than a lease arrangement, and the cost of this would have been prohibitive.

Most recently, we have been offered use of a plot of Council owned land in the Kingswood area. The Council are looking for us to share a stadium with the greyhounds, who will shortly have to leave the Boulevard. It is envisaged by the Council that the greyhound organisation would build the stadium and we would be their tenants.

This arrangement would mean that many of the community initiatives crucial to our plans would not be incorporated, and we do not believe such a set up would be financially viable for speedway to survive in the long term, which is our aim. Our preference would be for the greyhounds and speedway to be joint tenants of the Council, this would offer us greater security of tenure.

The greyhound promotion, who are well aware of our interest in this project, have, up to press, shown no interest in discussing this situation with us, which casts doubt as to whether this project will get off the ground".