Sport and Leisure
As described above under Architecture, Thornton Heath gained a new state-of-the-art leisure centre in May 2004. In the first month of opening, there were 5,200 admissions to swim and 9,500 walking tours of the centre, with around 700 people joining as members. The popularity was such that turnstiles had to be fitted to improve security. The official opening ceremony was attended by Iain Dowie (manager of Crystal Palace F.C.), and Crystal Palace players Andrew Johnson, Danny Butterfield and Shaun Derry. The centre is owned by Croydon Council, but was originally run by Parkwood Leisure, although it is now run by Fusion Lifestyle in partnership with the Council.
Thornton Heath formerly had a Non-League football club, Croydon Athletic F.C., who played at the Keith Tuckey Stadium; but the club ceased to exist at the end of the 2010/11 season.
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Famous quotes containing the words sport and/or leisure:
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
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—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)