A village cricket green believed to be the oldest in the world continuously used to play the game is under threat from developers, players say.

Mitcham cricket green in south London has reputedly been home to the sound of leather against willow since 1685, but the club it houses believes its long and distinguished innings could shortly come to an end.

Mitcham cricket club’s 115-year-old pavilion forms part of a site bought by Phoenix Group Investments, along with an abandoned Grade II-listed pub, the Burn Bullock, named after a Surrey cricketer, and an unused car park.

The club says that since the 2008 purchase Phoenix has refused to disclose its bank details or clarify the terms or existence of the lease, formerly with Punch Taverns.

Phoenix has submitted plans to build a 70-room hotel on the car park as part of a development that would encroach on the club’s ground and lead to the demolition of its equipment shed. The company has said it will not discuss the lease until it gets planning permission.

Although the plans provide for the continued existence of the cricket ground, the club secretary and ladies’ team captain, Julia Gault, said they provided no details of who would meet the cost of reconfiguring it and were being imposed on the club without any say.

“They’d leave us with a set of plans we never wanted,” she said. “We’d end up homeless, we couldn’t continue playing cricket on that ground, which would be the end of over 300 years of history but also the end of cricket for this community. It would be a terrible, terrible shame.”

Lord Nelson reportedly travelled from his Merton home to watch the local team in action on the green. In 1937 a record crowd for the green of 10,000 people watched the touring Australian women’s team play Surrey women’s team.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of Mitcham cricket club in 1912. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

The club is thriving at at time when there are concerns about the national team being dominated by private school alumni and a lack of places to play the game in cities.

“Most of the young people who play for us are at state schools,” said Gault. “The subs are very low, £42 a year. Most clubs are two, three, four times that. We know a lot of people who come to us can’t afford more than that. We are incredibly multicultural, with children from every cricket-playing nation and quite a few others. We have joked that the first Afghan to play for England might come from the club. We’ve got Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Indians, Caribbean, African heritage, Europeans, even a Lithuanian.”

The uncertainty over the lease is affecting the club’s ability to function. “Because we don’t have a confirmed tenancy with the current name of the leaseholder on it, we can’t do things like apply for grants.” said Gault. “Every pound we have to raise ourselves. Most grant-giving organisations want to see you’ve got rights to be in the building you’re in.

“Eventually we’ll get to the point where we need something really major done, like the roof repairs on a building [the pavilion] that as far as anyone else is concerned we don’t have any rights to occupy, which is very bizarre seeing as it was built for us.”

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The former England and Surrey captain Alec Stewart is among those to have backed the club, urging people to “show your support for a fine cricket club with a proud history and we hope a bright future too”.

The club has also received cross-party support from local councillors for a proposal for the “transfer of Mitcham cricket pavilion and all its operational land and buildings into community ownership and management through transfer of the freehold or provision of a 999-year lease at a peppercorn rent ahead of any new development”.

Marcus Beale, the architect hired by Phoenix and the recent co-investor Westbury Investments to design the project, said the company did not want to grant the club a lease in case it put a fence around the cricket ground and jeopardised the redevelopment.

He said that until the plans were approved, the company could not determine the appropriate level of rent or how much it might be able to contribute towards the reconfiguration of the cricket club.

“We are stressing to them that there’s no intention of taking them off the site,” he said. “I’m not aware of any reason for them to fear this.”