Game’s great cathedrals lost in the mists of time
WHILE Fulham add swimming pools and Michelinstar restaurants to Craven Cottage to bring it into the future, some British grounds have been lost in the mists of time.
Middlesbrough’s Ayresome Park disappeared 29 years ago and Derby’s Baseball Ground followed two years later. For Gen Z, these iconic stadiums are only found in history books. For an older generation, they were where memories were formed, dreams were born and heroes admired.
These grounds remain as iconic as ever to those who remember them, a point proved by the response to Mail Sport journalist Ian Ladyman’s journey back to the old Maine Road centre circle, in south Manchester, last year.
The plaque laid at that spot is classy, but it is the merest fragment, nonetheless. What similar remnants might still exist at these places, which we might call ‘ghost grounds’?
Mail Sport chief photographer Andy Hooper led our own quest to find out, selecting stadiums where the greatest occasions played out, some of which are now not even on the map.
It was the huge challenge of even locating some of these places which surprised Andy. There are no brown tourism signs, no blue plaques, yet still evidence of an abiding fascination with them. Where Andy travelled I followed, finding that the ghosts of ages past walk tall in some, though not all, of these places.
The spirit of West Ham United, for example, is alive and well on Green Street, in east London, though you need to look twice to be sure. On the whitewashed exterior wall of a vaping shop, a rather unconvincing cartoon of Bobby Moore is shown crashing through the bricks, and just inside the establishment’s door there is artwork of Moore’s and Trevor Brooking’s West Ham jerseys, hanging on a clothes rail amid discarded socks and scarves.
The young men running the shop would not know Brooking if he walked in and asked for a vape, but that is not the point.
This is where Upton Park stood for 112 years and, though it has been seven since it made way for a housing development, fans still come back to drink at the legendary Boleyn Tavern and imbibe the spirit of a rich footballing past.
‘We thought the images would make people look twice at our place,’ says one of the assistants at the shop, pointing to the Europa Conference League trophy image on the back wall. ‘The stadium’s gone, but people associate this street with the club. Yes, we think it’s made us stand out.’
They are not the only ones. Green Street remains claret and blue in so many ways, from the fascia of the Upton Park Builders’ Merchants to the bright paintwork of St Edward’s Catholic Primary School. An old 10ft by 8ft club crest was found in a storage unit and restored by fans to a position on the wall of the UK Fitness Club gym.
‘We get people through here all
the time, looking to see where they once came,’ says JP, a gym staff member. ‘I’ve tried to familiarise myself with the history.’
up and down the land, fans are retracing their steps down football’s old highways and byways, looking for the soul that has been lost when clubs left communities for all-purpose, allseater stadiums.
‘You’re the sixth person this week to ask me about the baseball ground,’ says Ron Peters, who lives in one of the houses built around the grassy rectangle which was the scene of such glories under brian Clough and Dave Mackay.
None of the redevelopments nod quite so stylishly to the past as the baseball ground, with homes clustered around the old pitch and an accompanying statue.
but our journey leaves the sense that these old cathedrals could do far more to point up and mark this significant part of british social history. It’s been a process of ‘hunt the pitch’ at times.
A distinctive redbrick stadium wall, with fading whitewash part of its appeal, is the sole remnant of Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough, also housed over now.
This was the one we found most elusive. Is the circular patch of grass in a children’s play area the centre spot where Wilf Manion and billy Ashcroft kicked off? It was impossible to tell. It is the same for the small patch of grass on the upton Park housing development, though perhaps the saddest form of collective amnesia is at brighton’s old goldstone ground. It is a bland, soulless retail park, with no nod to Peter Ward, Kit Napier and saturdays of derring-do.
In keeping with many other old ground sites, the streets of the houses where sunderland’s Roker Park stood have footballthemed names — Roker Park Close, Turnstile Mews and goalmouth Close. Nothing more.
highbury is the old stadium most intact. The sophisticated, expensive highbury square development builds on the history of the site. Arriving here at dusk on the evening of an Arsenal match at the emirates reveals that living in the square provides the full, authentic Arsenal experience.
A 10-minute walk separates stadiums old and new and you can smell the onions from the burger vans set up at the bottom of highbury hill.
The development is split into four blocks — north, south, east and west stands — and the steps that led to the Marble halls, from where Arsene Wenger once addressed the press, are still here. Yet it’s residents- only access to the old pitch. I ask a resident if he will open the locked gate into that sanctuary. he smiles politely and walks on.
The Maine Road centre circle, where Colin bell, Francis Lee and Mike summerbee displayed their talents, does not radiate its old glories. The bronze plaque is set on a barren patch of dusty land that was muddy when I visited.
but those who live at this place are accustomed to questions about their neighbourhood’s rich past.
‘It’s nice the way they’ve marked it,’ says resident eileen Fisher, pushing her two-year- old child. ‘My father and brothers are City fans and they envy me living here. It’s a shrine.’