Chelmsford City have been thrown a lifeline and the club hope to be in their proposed new stadium at Beaulieu Park in time for the big kick-off to the 2000/01 season.

Club chief executive Gary Bellamy said he was "absolutely delighted" at the news, which simply assures the future of the 60-year football club.

"Yesterday the club had no future - today we have," he said. "Had the decision gone against us then in reality the club as it is would have been no more after this summer and Chelmsford without any senior football.

"The Football in the Community scheme would certainly have finished, senior players would be looking for other clubs and I would have been scouring the jobs pages of the Chronicle for employment," he admitted.

"There is now a great deal of work to be done and talks to be held with many people, including the borough council who I hope will accept the decision, and not hold any grudges," Bellamy added.

"I want to work with them for what will be a community-based development that will benefit many more people than perhaps it is realised.

"The days of a football club at any level just having a ground and attracting spectators every other week to one match have long gone," he said.

"As we have said before we see such a new complex being used all the time by a wide variety of people in the community."

The club are already in talks with one of the leading local Chelmsford churches, which is keen to expand its many community activities, and club officials will be talking again to the successful Chelmsford Hockey Club who need better facilities to be able to play in the national league.

"They need a water-based astro turf to be allowed to play in that league in the year 2000 and there is no such pitch in the mid Essex area," he said.

"We would see the provision of such a playing surface as a key element of the new stadium complex because it would also be used by our Football in the Community scheme and for other community uses."

Club chairman Peter Stroud yesterday admitted that, had Countryside Properties lost their appeal, it would have been end of Chelmsford City Football Club - he would have been forced to resign along with Gary Bellamy.

"We just couldn't go on after this summer without the prospect of a new home of our own and the club would have been forced to shut - it was that close,'' he declared.

"Our own respective positions would have been untenable and we would have had to walk away''.

This weekend the club's ground development action group will be sitting down to finalise their programme for Beaulieu Park.

The club will then submit formal plans to the council "within the next two weeks'' with the determined hope that their new stadium will be ready by 2000.

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.