Camelot rugby club wants alcohol to 1am and outdoor music on its playing field. Dacorum's own pollution team objects too. Hearing 11am, Friday 18 Sept.

Three councillors will decide on Friday morning whether Hemel Hempstead’s rugby club can sell alcohol until 1am and play amplified music outdoors until the same hour.

Hemel Hempstead (Camelot) RUFC has applied for a premises licence at its Chaulden Lane ground. Dacorum Borough Council received 29 representations on it. Of those, 27 came from residents living near the club, one from a ward councillor and one from a responsible authority, the council’s own Environmental and Community Protection pollution team (Appendix A, licensing sub-committee papers).

The Licensing of Alcohol and Gambling Sub-Committee hears it at 11am on Friday 18 September in the Council Chamber at The Forum, Marlowes. The meeting is public. Councillors Jonathan Gale, Terry Douris and Ron Tindall sit on it (agenda).

What the club has asked for

The club already holds a club premises certificate, which covers members and their guests. This application is for a separate premises licence to run alongside it, which would let the club serve the general public and hire the place out.

The hours applied for are these:

  • alcohol, for drinking on the premises and taking away, until midnight Monday to Thursday, 1am on Friday and Saturday and 11pm on Sunday
  • live and recorded music, indoors and outdoors, until midnight Monday to Thursday, 1am Friday and Saturday, 11pm Sunday
  • films, indoors and outdoors, until midnight Monday to Wednesday, 12.30am Thursday, 1am Friday and Saturday
  • late night refreshment, indoors and outdoors, from 11pm to midnight Monday to Thursday and to 1am on Friday and Saturday
  • premises open to the public until 12.30am on weeknights and 1.30am on Friday and Saturday

Dance, indoor sport, and boxing or wrestling are also on the application. Boxing and wrestling would end at 11pm every day.

Table of the finishing times sought in the Camelot Rugby Club premises licence application, by activity and day
Finishing times as applied for. Source: Appendix A, Dacorum Borough Council licensing sub-committee papers, 18 September 2026.
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Two phrases in the application are doing most of the work in the objections. On recorded music, the club wrote: “We use recorded music regularly in both bars and the patio. This will continue and may occasionally be extended to the car park and adjoining playing field.” On outdoor entertainment, it wrote: “We run an annual fireworks event, typically on the Friday nearest to the 5th November. We expect around 1000 attendees.”

Why the club says it needs it

The application sets out the case at length, and it is a money case as much as a community one. The club describes itself as the only rugby union club in Hemel Hempstead, running mini and junior sections, adult and veteran teams, women’s rugby and disability rugby.

The club premises certificate, it says, limits it on three things: serving non-members, hosting larger public events, and partnering with outside organisations. A premises licence running alongside it would let the club “host community events, functions, and fundraisers without the constraints of membership rules”.

On money, the application is blunt: “Like many grassroots sports organisations, the Club faces ongoing financial pressures. The constraints of the CPC limit potential revenue streams, which are essential for long-term sustainability.”

The club already advertises the clubhouse for hire on its own website, for “meetings and conferences to team-building days and corporate celebrations”, with a “fully licensed bar” (Camelot RFC).

The council’s own pollution team has objected

The responsible authority objection is the one to watch, because it comes from inside the council and it is specific.

The Environmental and Community Protection pollution team told licensing that outdoor films, music and dance running to those hours “risk creating a public nuisance”, while the same activities finishing outdoors by 10pm, or held indoors, “are unlikely to do so”. It made the same point about late night refreshment outdoors.

The team also disclosed two logged noise complaints about the club: reference R937548 on 10 May 2025, from someone who wrote that they could “hear every word” with all windows and doors closed, and R946088 on 17 July 2025, recorded as a disco music event. No further action was taken on either because they were one-offs, but the team said they were “indicative of residents being capable of being affected by loud events at this venue”.

What the residents say

The 27 resident objections run to dozens of pages, and they return to the same points. The most common are:

  • amplified music carrying from the club into homes on Old Fishery Lane, Chaulden Lane, Cangels Close and Northridge Way, including when indoor events are held with the doors open
  • weekday finishing times of midnight, on nights before work and school
  • the proposal to extend recorded music into the car park and the playing field, which sit next to residential gardens
  • parking on Chaulden Lane during events, and litter and glass along the boundary
  • the absence of any cap on how many outdoor events can be held in a year

Several objectors made clear they are not against the club itself. One wrote that they were “not objecting to its established sporting activities or its continued operation under its existing Club Premises Certificate”, and that the concern was “the significant expansion proposed through this new premises licence”.

The conditions asked for most often are an outdoor music curfew of 10pm, a requirement that doors and windows stay shut during indoor entertainment, a measurable noise limit, and an annual cap on outdoor events.

The ward councillor is not objecting

The ward councillor representation is not an objection, and the distinction matters. It says: “We are fully supportive of Camelot Rugby Club’s wish to extend its licensing terms so as to increase its income from events and we are not in objection to this application.”

It then asks the sub-committee to consider three mitigations: a limit on the number of open air events and an earlier finish for them, with official club matches and tournaments excluded; a reduced music volume after a certain time; and a firmer approach to noise from people leaving and from smokers outside after 11pm.

The nature reserve on the other side of the fence

One objection turns on the land next door, and the underlying facts check out.

The club’s pitches sit alongside Gadespring Cressbeds, a four acre former watercress farm bought by the Box Moor Trust in 2011 and managed as a nature reserve. The Trust’s own description places it “between Camelot Rugby Club’s pitches and the Grand Union canal” and next to Old Fishery Lane (Box Moor Trust). The River Bulbourne runs between the two.

The Trust and the club go back a long way. The Trust’s own page on the sports clubs it hosts records that Camelot moved to the Chaulden Lane site with help from Dacorum Borough Council, the New Towns Development Corporation and the Trust itself, after the club was re-founded in 1951. It traces the club’s roots to 1919, and says Camelot now fields six senior men’s teams, dozens of youth teams and a women’s team (Box Moor Trust).

The objector asked the council to consult its ecology officers and the Trust before deciding, and to attach lighting and litter conditions. No ecological objection appears in the papers.

What the sub-committee can actually do

It has four options under section 17 of the Licensing Act 2003, set out in the officer’s report. It can grant the licence with conditions drawn from the operating schedule and modified as it thinks appropriate; it can cut activities out of the licence altogether; it can refuse to name the proposed premises supervisor; or it can reject the application.

Officers make no recommendation. The report says it is “considered inappropriate for officers involved in the administration of applications to make recommendations”.

Any party, including the club and anyone who made a representation, can appeal to a magistrates’ court within 21 days of being notified of the decision.

What it means for you

If you live in Chaulden, Boxmoor or on the lanes around the ground, Friday morning decides the hours for years, not for one event. A premises licence has no expiry date. The conditions attached on Friday are the ones that will be enforced in 2030.

The consultation window has closed, so you cannot add a new objection now. What you can do is attend. The hearing is at 11am on Friday 18 September in the Council Chamber at The Forum, Marlowes, HP1 1DN, and it is a public meeting. A second licensing hearing, on a KFC application at Maylands Avenue, runs at 10am the same morning in the same room.

If the licence is granted and the noise that follows is worse than you expect, the route is not the licensing team but a noise complaint to environmental health, which is how the two 2025 complaints reached the file in the first place. Enough of those can support an application to review a licence, which is a separate process that can strip conditions back.

The club’s bar holds a five-star food hygiene rating from its last inspection in October 2024, rated as Camelot R U F Club (Food Standards Agency).

Sources