When Jayne picked me up from the station this evening we went home via the new K2 leisure centre which opened yesterday. The kids had gone there for a nose around and we were going to stop there and pick them up, since we have to pass the place anywhere.

Passing the place has been quite interesting lately, as the deadline for opening has been getting closer the site managed to transform from a building site to a shiny new building over a weekend. Even on Sunday the car park was almost full of white vans as a whole army of sub-contractors were making the final touches.

We had a bit of a look around ourselves while we were there. On the whole I found the centre to be very impressive. I would have been disappointed if it was less than impressive, given the cost of it.

The overwhelming impression is of open space. The old leisure centre seemed to have only narrow corridors to get from one part of it to another and was a bit claustrophibic, but the new one has lots of wide and high spaces.

The obvious crowd-pullers are the indoor climbing wall and the 50-metre pool, which are everything we were led to expect. I love the huge, curved wooden roof beams in the pool area. I have heard that the pool is not actually Olympic-sized after all, being too narrow. I am not sure if that is true, but it is the right length and that is good enough for practice and for local, regional and even national events. It would prevent actual Olympic events from being held in Crawley, but since that was never going to happen I can’t see a problem there.

The gymnastics hall looked especially well-stocked with every imaginable piece of equipment, and the main sports hall and its 8 badminton courts is enormous. If the seating is pulled out of the wall it can, apparently, seat more than 1400. I would like to think that this will increase the chances of some decent bands playing in town at some point.

Everything else looked great – the 5 squash courts, the indoor bowling green and the leisure pool. The aerobics rooms and the gym both have large windows facing the front of the building and were being well-used already.

I could only find two things wrong with the place. The stairs looked a bit tatty for a place which has been open only a day. They are scratched, dented and stained and look like they have been well-used for a long time. I don’t know if this is because of builders going up and down in the last few days, but I do worry about what they will look like in a year’s time.

The other quibble I have is with the entrance. For a building with so much space, the entrance was extraordinarily crowded. Either it was badly designed or people are not behaving the way they were expected to by the architects. I hope it is the latter as that can be sorted with a sign or two. To get in the building, there is a gate and a couple of turnstiles and the counter is immediately beyond that barrier. As we were trying to leave the queue of people wanting to use the facilities was coming out and obstructing the exit.

Lets not finish on a negative point though – the new K2 centre is a brilliant building. I will have to go back during daylight and get some photos of it, including the bizarre bollards outside, which appear to be made from CDs.