Football’s Lost Grounds Remembered

The football season may have come to an end, bringing joy to some, despair to others, but in Scarborough the fans turned out in their numbers for a trip down memory lane.

The venue was the local library in Vernon Road, where their latest Community History Month talk drew a capacity crowd. They were here to learn about Yorkshire’s Lost and Historic Football Grounds from Dr. Tosh Warwick, a History lecturer at Sheffield university and a noted writer on the beautiful game. There is a Facebook page Lost Football Grounds & Terraces of the United Kingdom established by Neil Richardson.

Alongside him was Bradford-based Paul Town, one of the finest football artists in the country, whose stunning portraits of football stadia are much in demand both north and south of the Border. All the excitement and colourful pageantry of the game, the pride and the passion, the hopes and impossible dreams are captured in his paintings - and the selection he had brought was widely admired.

Tosh, a Middlesbrough fan, kicked off with his own fond memories of growing up on the same street as had the legendary Wilf Mannion, in the shadow of Ayresome Park, which sadly closed in 1995. He was there with his Dad to see the curtain come down on 92 years of history. He spoke with feeling about the importance of grounds such as this to the community they are at the heart of and the need to accord them the same reverence as we do churches and civic buildings.

He believes there is currently a nostalgic longing for the old centrally-located grounds that more than made up in character for what they lacked in amenities. One by one they are being replaced by modern purpose-built stadia on the outskirts of town, that in some ways lack the sense of community and the traditional atmosphere.

Many in attendance were, of course, supporters of Scarborough Athletic, a ‘phoenix club’, reborn in 2007 out of the ashes of the Conference club wound up with debts of £2.5 million. They moved into the new Flamingo Land Stadium ten years later. Paying a warm tribute to their achievement in coming back to life, Tosh gave a detailed history of the club dating back to 1879, including their unique ‘phantom win’ in the Cleveland Cup in 1898, when the opposition failed to turn up. The home team kicked off, walked in a goal and were declared winners! It was one of those events that are now embedded in the rich folk lore of the game.

Some rare footage of the old Scarborough Football’s stadium, the Athletic Ground, on Seamer Road, on what is now the site of a supermarket, brought a gasp from the assembly. It was clearly to the amazement of the younger members of the audience, not old enough to remember the dozen years their team spent in the Football League. In its later years the ground was renamed the McCain Stadium, after the name of its sponsor. It became affectionately known as the ‘Theatre of Chips’, McCain’s being a local manufacturer of the oven-ready variety.

Another ‘lost ground’ of fond memory for lovers of cricket more perhaps than of soccer was Sheffield United’s Bramhall Lane. Yorkshire County Cricket club was formed at the Adelphi Hotel in the Steel City in 1863 and played the summer game at Bramhall Lane until 1973. Sadly, the Roses clash between Yorkshire and Lancashire in August of that year saw the end of it as a cricket venue with the new football South Stand being constructed over the square and the magnificent pavilion demolished. Bramall Lane, opened in 1855, is arguably the most historic football stadium in the world, even though designed primarily for cricket and athletics.

Hull City’s Boothferry Park, Rotherham’s Millmoor and York’s Bootham Crescent, which closed as recently as 2021, were also recalled vividly in words and images, their loss still keenly felt by supporters of those clubs.

Paul Town has not only portrayed these grounds, and numerous others in England and Scotland, but evoked the unique spirit of each. His oil paintings - available as original commissions or sold as prints - have proved enormously popular not just with a global audience of football fans but as works of art to be admired, treasured and displayed by a wide range of people. They hang on the walls of boardrooms of football clubs the length and breadth of the country.

Paul, a Bradford City season ticket-holder of long-standing, was here to give a personal view of the loss to his home city of Bradford Park Avenue. He was born at St Luke’s Hospital only a misplaced clearance away from the old ground and his Dad, Barry, had successful trials with the club and scored for them. His many paintings of it as it was in the 1950s and ’60s does full justice to the impressive stand with the three gables, typical of the work of Archibald Leitch, the Scottish architect, who designed so many of football’s most iconic grounds. The beautiful old Park Avenue sports complex which housed both football and cricket, abandoned in 1979, is tragically now a wilderness.

Paul is currently collaborating with Tosh on a book featuring his paintings. Tosh’s own book Lost Football Grounds and Terraces of the UK will appear next year. As part of his continuing research into the history of the game he has appealed to supporters to email him their memories and pictures of the old grounds no longer with us. (t.warwick@sheffield.ac.uk)

It was a night where memories were stirred and rekindled and, for the younger in attendance, memories were made of what their community had lost.