Active Leisure Contracts (ALC), the Kent based sports contractors, have been busy completing five new natural grass bowling greens across England inside a year.

Projects were carried out both directly for clients and on a sub-contract basis at sites as far a field as Durham and Dover.

In the north, ALC worked as subcontractor with a local civil engineering company to construct two greens for miners welfare clubs at Pity Me, County Durham & Harton and Westoe in South Shields. Further south, ALC worked on behalf of ROK Construction to complete the new Wolverton Park Bowls Club, a project to relocate an existing bowls club to another part of Milton Keynes from its original site.

In Mottingham, South-East London, ALC worked on behalf of the Duke of Kent Court Bowls Club to relocate to a Greenfield site by designing and constructing their new green. ALC cleared the site, constructed access roads, pathways, car parks, security fencing plus drainage and irrigation systems while another contractor built the new clubhouse.

Lastly, ALC completed a project for the Dover Harbour Board to build their bowls green at the organisation’s sports and social club in Whitfield, just outside Dover. ALC constructed a new green next to the existing clubhouse building, fitting the green construction into the side of a hill.

 “All the greens had a similar construction specification comprising of a sandy rootzone over a stone drainage layer. Use of the company’s automatic laser grader for levelling ensured that all greens exceeded the English Bowling Associations tight tolerances for green levels. All greens were turfed using big rolls which were cut to a finer thickness than normal to ensure accurate levels. This did cause some problems with turf overheating in the roll” commented ALC’s divisional director Martin Longstaffe, “But we solved this by laying the turf on the same day as it was cut and irrigating as soon as we could.

All of the greens featured Sportsmark county concrete ditch units around their perimeters covered by artificial grass. ALC also designed and installed a TORO based automatic pop up watering systems on all but one of the sites.

Ted Camp, Chairman of the Duke of Kent Bowls Club commented on ALC’s work at Mottingham: “We found ALC did what they said they would do, on time and to budget including other aspects of the construction beyond just the greens. We are extremely satisfied with the job that they have done here.”

In between these greens ALC also found time to re level and relay two further greens as well as install numerous sets of new bowling green ditch channels around the country. They really are “the masters of bowls technology”!