Bring back the farm park and no more house building.

This is the plea of Dartford residents who responded online to news that a well-known leisure area in Stone is “likely” to have homes built on it.

Stone Lodge – a largely open green space reserved for sport, leisure and recreational use – is “almost certain” to receive some residential development as part of a consultation on how to market the site to potential developers, according to council leader Jeremy Kite.

When the news was revealed on Facebook, a flurry of comments came in, calling for the reopening of Stone Lodge Farm Park – which closed in the 1990s due to dwindling profits – and rejecting the idea of building homes on the site near Cotton Lane.

Of all the comments received by the Messenger, 63% said they would like to see the return of the park whilst 46% said they don’t want to see houses built there.

Sport, leisure, and recreational use is to be the “primary driver” of any development that takes place at Stone Lodge, according to council cabinet documents.

Terry Farthing, secretary of Halls Bowls Club based on the site, agreed that reopening the farm would be a “fantastic idea”, but said that something needed to be done about the state of the land.

He said: “We were promised four to six football pitches on the site when we first based ourselves here in 2008. Now the whole site is derelict.

“It’s so dangerous for people. There are young kids riding motorbikes all over the place and we had horses roaming around on it.

“I would like to see the area surrounding us looked after a bit more. I don’t think the club would be opposed to a small bit of house building, but we would raise issue if an entire estate was built here.”

Dave Baker, former mayor of Dartford, oversaw the closure of Stone Lodge Farm Park as chairman of Dartford council’s Arts and Leisure Committee in the mid to late 1990s.

He agreed that the farm was once a bustling community asset, but said that reopening the farm would be tough.

He said: “It was being run by a private contractor and they weren’t making a profit so it closed. It was a shame because a lot of schools used it and many families went along. It was sad when it closed.

“It had all your farm animals there – pigs, sheep, goats – and they used to do a lot of breeding there. Children used to go over there to see the new litter.”

Mr Baker added that there were discussions about building a Snowdome-style ski slope on the site while he was a councillor, but the idea never took off.

Cllr Jonathan Hawkes, ward councillor for Stone and leader of Dartford Labour, backed the continued main use for sports and recreation, but raised issues over housing.

He said: “It’s a matter of some regret that the council has done nothing with the land for so long. We wanted to put this for community use for some time and it’s only now that there is commercial potential that they have done something about it. It’s reactive, rather than proactive.

“A broad development mix might include any number of things and it doesn’t seem to rule out housing. I do understand the need for briefs to be flexible, but we do have to be careful that flexibility doesn’t open the door to developments not welcome in the eyes of residents.”