A grant of \u00a31.4m to demolish the building and construct a new one was secured by EGBC from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport as part of its Youth Investment Fund.<\/p>\n
EGBC said around \u00a3200,000 of the money had already been spent on preparatory work and surveys. <\/p>\n
After its initial contractor pulled out of the project, it found a new one who was “ready to go” when it heard the rest of the funding was being withdrawn.<\/p>\n
Jay Solder, deputy county director of EGBC, admitted there was a “slight shortfall” between the grant and actual cost of the build, but his organisation had enough funds to cover it.<\/p>\n
“But that wasn’t enough for SIB to deem the project worthy of continuing,” he told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“I just couldn’t believe that we’d invested so much time into a project, to get it so close that everyone was ready to get working – for them to still say ‘no’, it was gutting really.”<\/p>\n
John Plummer, treasurer of both the Lifstan Boys Club and Southend Amateur Boxing Club, said he feared the two clubs would “become extinct” without a new building.<\/p>\n
“I think that’s disgraceful that it could happen,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I hope we find a solution but I can’t see one in the near future.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A grant of \u00a31.4m to demolish the building and construct a new one was secured by EGBC from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":["post-3368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}