Once an integral part of the towns and cities they called home, dozens of the nation’s Football League grounds have disappeared over the past 30 or so years. All took with them a wealth of memories for generations of supporters.
But what happened next? The Athletic has travelled the country to find out, taking in an array of housing estates, retail parks and even the odd hospital along the way. Our travels so far have been chronicled in part 1, part 2 and part 3.
The final part of our series focuses on those clubs to have upped sticks in the last 15 years, starting in south Wales.
Pope John Paul II and Bob Marley are among an eclectic group to have graced a venue that has hosted Real Madrid and Sporting Lisbon, plus homegrown greats such as John Charles and Gareth Bale.
Cardiff City’s Ninian Park was so much more than just a football ground in the Welsh capital, as rickety and rundown as the old place had become before the gates closed for the final time in 2009.
It felt a fitting stage for showpiece occasions, be that the Pope’s visit in 1982 for a youth rally that attracted a crowd of 35,000 or the latest vital World Cup qualifier. For a time, Ninian Park was even a 1990s trailblazer for dynamic pricing — fans paid more to get in if the team was in the top three — long before the music industry and other forms of entertainment latched on to the idea.
Ninian Park in the 2000s (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
All this storied history, however, counted for little when the opportunity came for the club to enjoy a brighter future via a move across Sloper Road to the brand new £30million Cardiff City Stadium.
Soon, the Bob Bank (so called because it once cost a ‘bob’ — around 5 pence in today’s money — to stand on the Popular Bank terrace) had been consigned to dust along with the rest of a ground that at times had a notorious reputation for hooliganism, especially when rivals Swansea City were visiting the capital.
A smart housing estate, called appropriately enough ‘Ninian Park’, now stands where reggae singer Marley performed on his Rastaman Vibration Tour in 1976. ‘Bartley Wilson Way’, named in honour of the football club’s founder, winds its way through the 142 houses.
The gates of the old Ninian Park opposite the new housing estate (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
Cardiff’s new home — extended to a capacity of 33,280 a decade ago — sits just a couple of hundred yards away and features a couple of poignant nods to it’s predecessor, including a plaque in honour of Jock Stein after the legendary Scotland manager collapsed and died in the dugout during a World Cup qualifier in 1985.
A plaque in memory of Jock Stein is one of several nods to Ninian Park’s past (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
A pair of gates, inscribed ‘Cardiff City 1910-2009′, have also been hung opposite Bartley Wilson Way to pay tribute to a ground where arguably the club’s finest hour came when beating Real Madrid 1-0 in the 1966 European Cup Winners’ Cup quarter-final first leg.
Millmoor, Rotherham, might not boast a pedigree that includes famous European nights or even the odd papal visit. But, of all the former league grounds vacated by clubs over the past 30 years, there can be little doubt it remains the most eerie to visit.
Time really has stood still here since United moved out in 2008. Not only does the ‘new’ main stand remain half-built, destined never to be finished. But the other three sides of a ground that did 89 years of Football League service remain just as they were when United decamped following a row with the Booth family, who own the land along with the adjacent scrapyard.
The site has a degree of maintenance, including the pitch being cut regularly. Supporters visiting the nearby New York Stadium — Rotherham’s home since 2012 after spending four years renting the now demolished Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield — can park here on a matchday.
But, still, there is a ghostly, Marie Celeste-style feel to Millmoor that hasn’t been evident elsewhere on our tour, save for how Mother Nature has been allowed to reclaim Bradford (Park Avenue) over the past 50 years.
The pitch is still cut regularly at Millmoor (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
This feels especially the case when walking down the narrow alleyway that used to lead to the visitors’ turnstiles. Here, the £2.40 concession price of admission for watching Rotherham in that final 2007-2008 season can still be seen printed on the wall, while fans of the hooligan film I.D. starring Reece Dinsdale will surely recognise a ground that doubled as the home of fictional Shadwell Town.
Millmoor remains as it was when Rotherham left (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
No one seems to know why the site hasn’t been bulldozed. Especially because there’s no covenant on the land, unlike the one in Bradford that meant the Park Avenue site gradually decayed because it was not allowed to be used for anything but sports and recreation. Maybe a solution will be found in time.
Doncaster Rovers‘ old Belle Vue home is a more recent example of somewhere that lay empty for years only to now, like Stoke, boast a smart housing estate. Here, there are some pleasing touches that other developers could learn from.
The Rovers club badge etched into the gable of a house built where the main stand used to sit is a nice touch. As are how the properties either side have front walls adorned with a football or the period that Belle Vue hosted football (1922 to 2007).
The houses with a Rovers badge on top (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
Sitting just across a busy dual carriageway from the city’s racecourse where the famous St Leger is run every year, Belle Vue’s two home terraces are remembered in the street signs ‘Town End’ and ‘Popular Mews’.
The roads where Belle Vue once stood are a nod to the past (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
Thankfully, there’s no such reminder of perhaps the ground’s most notorious episode in 1995 — when then owner Ken Richardson hired a former SAS soldier to burn down the largely wooden main stand.
The plan, designed to force Rovers to move so the land could be sold for housing, failed despite the blaze spreading rapidly and causing damage estimated at around £100,000. Richardson was subsequently jailed for four years after the bungling arsonist was traced by police, who found not only his mobile phone at the scene but cans of petrol and a haversack.
Doncaster moved in 2007 to the Eco-Power Stadium (formerly Keepmoat Stadium), a 15,000-capacity all-seater venue shared with the town’s rugby league club that sits a pleasant 15-minute or so stroll round a lake from Belle Vue.
This was a hectic period for clubs heading for pastures new, with Rovers among a dozen EFL teams to relocate between 2005 and 2012. Then came something of a lull until a trio of Premier League teams swapped old for new in quick succession.
First up were West Ham United in 2016, ditching the Boleyn Ground for the Olympic Stadium just over three miles away. Today, Upton Gardens — West Ham’s home of 112 years was often referred to as Upton Park, which is actually the district — boasts 842 flats.
The Boleyn Ground before its final game in 2016 (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
There’s the odd salute to one of English football’s most iconic venues, including an open communal area where the centre circle used to be and a memorial garden located just off Green Street, close to where the John Lyall Gates once stood.
The ‘Champions’ statue honouring West Ham’s trio of World Cup winners also still gazes out across the area along with the building that used to house the Hammers Social Club, now a gym.
The flats where Upton Park once stood (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
But, really, there’s precious little for supporters keen on a trip down memory lane, other than that tribute on the junction of Green Street and Barking Road to Sir Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore and Martin Peters.
Tottenham Hotspur fans have no such laments, their new £1billion home having been built slap, bang on top of White Hart Lane. Opened in 2019, the new stadium pays homage to its predecessor with a plaque marking the centre spot where all 2,533 matches had kicked off.
The plaque proudly marks the spot where thousands of Spurs’ home games began (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
Brentford moved a year later into their own state-of-the-art new home, the 17,250-capacity Community Stadium. Less than a mile away sits the old Griffin Park site, on the verge of being cleared on The Athletic’s most recent visit.
Not much remains of Griffin Park (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
Housing is the intended use of a ground that was unique in English football for having a pub on all four corners. One of that quartet, The Griffin, now has a couple of club signs decorating the beer garden but it is to be hoped the property developer who bought Brentford’s former home can find a more permanent way to honour the site’s heritage.
How Griffin Park used to look from the air (Alex Burstow/Getty Images)
Likewise York City‘s old Bootham Crescent base, where a housing estate is under construction. Like Brentford, York were denied the chance to say a proper ‘goodbye’ by the Covid pandemic. Supporters only discovered later that a 1-0 win over Guiseley in front of just 627 fans in December, 2020, had brought the curtain down on 88 years of history.
Too often when travelling the highways and byways of this country, there’s been a sense that local planners have spectacularly failed to appreciate just what these lost grounds still mean to the community.
Bootham Crescent is becoming a housing estate (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
How, for generations, each place was so integral to the social fabric of life that the events of a Saturday afternoon could shape the mood of a town or city for days or even weeks ahead. And how strong the emotional attachment remains, even decades after the gates closed for the final time.
Farewell Bootham Crescent
1932-2021 ❤️💙 pic.twitter.com/k0a6uAytC0
— York City FC (@YorkCityFC) January 20, 2021
Which makes the too-familiar lack of formal recognition we’ve encountered on our travels all the more galling. Take Barnet‘s old Underhill home. The north London club, which had two spells in the Football League, moved out in 2013, destined for The Hive in Edgware.
No sign at the Ark Pioneer Academy points to the fact Barnet called Underhill home (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
Today, Ark Pioneer Academy occupies a site that famously sloped 11 feet from one end to the other. The narrow pathway that once led to the East Terrace is still there.
But, instead, of the faded black corrugated iron that used to welcome both home and away supporters, there’s now a fence to keep pupils in and the public out. Also absent is any indication that Barnet played here for 106 years.
One hundred and forty miles north, things are happily very different. Chesterfield left Saltergate, their home for 33 years longer than Barnet resided at Underhill, in 2010.
Housing now fills the site with nothing left of a venue that, thanks to its by-then archaic state, doubled as Derby’s Baseball Ground in the 2009 The Damned United film about Brian Clough’s controversial tenure as Leeds United manager in the mid-1970s.
How Saltergate looked in its final season (Pete Norton/Getty Images)
However, the developer’s attention to detail when commemorating all those decades of history has to be applauded. There a delightful play on Chesterfield’s Spireites nickname — the town is famous for it’s church with the crooked spire — via the road running through the estate called Spire Heights (when spoken in a local Derbyshire accent, the ‘H’ becomes silent). And that is not all.
There are several nods to Chesterfield’s former home at Saltergate, not least in the road names (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
The iron sculpture titled ‘Spirit of Saltergate’ is impressive and amusing. Among a variety of images depicting famous moments in the old ground’s history is one fan in a wheelchair. This is a nod to how the last ever goal at Chesterfield’s old home sparked a pitch invasion that included one young supporter in a wheelchair racing on to the turf and being chased by his distinctly unimpressed carer.
The ‘Spirit of Saltergate’ features a tribute to a famous fan (Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
The footage subsequently went viral to turn the fan into something of a YouTube sensation, hence the commemoration in iron that feels a fitting way to end our travelling odyssey around the lost Football League grounds that for generations were the beating heart of their communities.
(Top photo: One of the Brentford pubs has found a home for an old sign and seat and the flats at Upton Park. Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)
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