Lost Grounds: The first wave of stadiums replaced – and what remains of them

By Richard Sutcliffe

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 Athletichas travelled the country to find out, taking in an array of housing estates, retail parks and even the odd hospital along the way.

After last week’s visit to the forgotten and forlorn-looking Bradford Park Avenue, part two of our series features a selection of clubs among the first wave to move in the 1980s and 1990s. We start at one ground immortalised in an iconic painting that last sold at auction for almost £8million ($10.2m).

As shoppers go quietly about their business under a slate-grey Lancashire sky that local artist LS Lowry would surely have loved to paint, it is hard to believe an FA Cupfinal replay was once played here. Or that one of British football’s worst disasters unfolded on this very spot.

Welcome to what used to be Burnden Park, home to Bolton Wanderersfor more than a century and now a supermarket. Where Nat Lofthouse once thrilled tens of thousands on a Saturday afternoon, today the area rings mainly to the sound of the shop’s checkout tills.

Not quite the fate Lowry would have envisaged when using this as his inspiration for Going To The Match, his 1953 painting that featured supporters streaming into Bolton’s then-home ground. As with much of his work detailing people going about their everyday lives, the fans were painted against a backdrop of Lancashire’s industrial landscape.

Much of that has gone, including the tall chimneys on the horizon of a painting that sold for £7.8million when last put up for auction in 2021. Bolton received a million or so less than that when selling Burnden, the directors feeling their ambitions would be better served five miles across town at the newly-built Reebok Stadium, as it was called then.

The club left behind a wealth of memories along with a site that then lay derelict for two years, with travellers setting up home in the car park. Burnden was finally demolished in 1999 and a new Asda supermarket opened there six years later.

A nod to history can be found inside the store via various giant images of Wanderers in their heyday, plus a plaque dedicated to the 33 fans who died when disaster struck at an FA Cup quarter-final in 1946.

An estimated 85,000 turned up to watch Bolton take on Stoke City that fateful afternoon. A stadium with a record crowd of 69,912 just could not cope with the extra numbers and a fatal crush developed at the Railway End, which in reality was little more than an earth banking with some stone steps.

Such a thought brings a sudden chill to The Athletic, meaning it is time to cross the Pennines for the next stage of our tour.

Huddersfieldis our destination and another famous old ground abandoned as English football was dragged belatedly into the 20th century by a need to modernise following the Hillsborough disaster in nearby Sheffield that claimed 97 lives.

Lord Justice Taylor’s report into the tragic events of April 15, 1989, recommending a move to all-seater stadiums on safety grounds, marked the beginning of the end for Huddersfield’s Leeds Road, and many grounds like it.

With terracing on three sides, the home of a club crowned English champions three years in a row during the 1920s had to go. Happily for the fans, their 1994 move was a lot shorter than the one later made by their Bolton counterparts — just a few hundred yards to the new McAlpine Stadium.

To help fund the switch, Leeds Road was sold to a DIY chain for £5million. And because the money was integral to the new development, the old ground, including the rickety old Cowshed End terrace, was demolished within days of staging its final match.

A retail park quickly went up in its place, the only nod to the site’s former use being a metal plaque in the car park that signals where the centre spot used to be. Over the years, this has been stolen several times, but Huddersfield’s current home (today sponsored by beer company John Smith’s) now houses two of the old turnstile blocks from Leeds Road.

Considering the importance these old grounds had to their communities over decades, some form of permanent recognition feels like the bare minimum that should happen when a club move on.

Many, though, barely offer a hint to the past.

Take Elm Park, in Reading. A century of league football was played here, a short drive west from London’s outskirts, along with an FA Cup semi-final replay. Yet a wander around the housing estate that now occupies the site provides no clue whatsoever as to the area’s history.

Sure, the road that turns off Tilehurst Road is called ‘Elm Park’, but there’s nothing to differentiate this quiet lane from dozens around the UK with the same name, likewise at the bottom of what is quite a steep drop to Norfolk Road, where the old main stand used to be.

Without the help of a local who was passing by, we would have had no idea where the ground itself (which had a record crowd of 33,042) was located. Only with her assistance did we notice the contrast between the old terraced houses that once stood cheek-by-jowl with Elm Park, the stadium, and the new-build homes that now stand where Robin Friday, Trevor Senior et al once thrilled fans.

When Readingdecamped to the Madejski Stadium, a little over three miles away, in 1997, Elm Park was still a basic ground. Two open terraces were at either end, for a start. But the old place still deserves better.

The same goes for the Goldstone Ground, Brighton & Hove Albion’s home for 95 years until it was controversially sold from under the club’s feet by then-chairman Bill Archer and chief executive David Bellotti.

Unlike Reading, Huddersfield et al, what equated to an eviction in the summer of 1997 included no provision as to where Brightonmight play next. So, as demolition work began in preparation for a retail park being built, Brighton were still finalising ground-sharing arrangements with Gillingham — 75 miles (120km) away.

It would be another 14 years — a dozen of which were spent at the wholly inadequate Withdean Stadium athletics trackin Brighton — before the club had a home to call its own in the Amex Stadium.

Today, there is no trace of the Goldstone’s proud history at its former site. Not even a gold-painted ball in honour of David Beckham making his Manchester Unitedsenior debut here as a 17-year-old in the League Cup— ‘Goldenballs’ having been the nickname wife Victoria famously bestowed on the Englandcaptain.

Instead, a visit to this otherwise charming corner of Hove, with a park opposite and the grand townhouses on Goldstone Lane looking out over what used to be the ground’s open East Terrace, reveals little more than a series of nondescript retail units, the likes of which can be found in almost every town and city in the land.

AFC Wimbledonfans will no doubt empathise with their counterparts from Brighton, who still refuse to shop here almost three decades on.

A move from their own spiritual home in south London in 1991 to ground-share with Crystal Palaceat Selhurst Park set in chain a series of events that would eventually see their club disappear, the 1988 FA Cup winners being shunted 70 miles to Milton Keynes and subsequently rebranded MK Dons.

Happily, the phoenix club born out of that 2002 move did make it back to the Wimbledon borough in 2020. In fact, the club returned to the very same street, with the Cherry Red Records Stadium sitting just a few hundred yards — albeit in a different postcode — along Plough Lane from where Vinnie Jones, John Fashanu and co shook up the football establishment.

A five-foot sculpture celebrating that shock FA Cup final win over Liverpoolat Wembley in 1988 marks the location of possibly the most unlikely top-flight venue (the old Plough Laneboasted just 2,600 seats in its final year). There is also recognition of heroes from the past via several blocks in the 600-flat residential development now on that site being named after the likes of manager Dave Bassett, Lawrie Sanchez and Alan Cork.

Another London club effectively still playing in their old manor are Millwall. The Denwas notorious, closed a record five times by the Football Association because of hooliganism before the gates were padlocked permanently in 1993 ahead of the switch to Senegal Fields, so named because a street of houses called Senegal Road had once stood there.

The New Den — over time, the ‘New’ has been dropped, just as the club hoped — being just 500 yards from the old one means fans can take a stroll down memory lane on a matchday. The problem is there is not much to see when you do, other than a plaque commemorating Millwall’s 83 years at the former location.

Happily, much of the surroundings do remain to keep memories alive, including the stadium’s approach road Cold Blow Lane and the myriad railway arches that crisscross the area. Likewise, there is the large embankment that was part of the New Cross Stadium dog-racing track until 1975 and for many years offered those in the know a free view of the football.

Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough, in the north-east of England, is another spot where the surroundings have barely changed, even though next year will be the 30th anniversary of the club’s move to the Riverside Stadium. These include the tightly-packed rows of terraced houses and the primary school that made expansion impossible following the Taylor Report. Only the old hospital has gone when you visit now, replaced by more housing.

So interwoven was the old ground with the locality that the boundary wall of the old Holgate End still stands. The terrace where Middlesbrough’s more vociferous fans would congregate is further commemorated in a series of street names that include The Midfield and The Turnstile.

Bronze sculptures depict key parts of the pitch, while the old Ayresome Park gates now stand proudly outside the Riverside as another link to the ground that hosted one of the World Cup’s biggest shocks — North Korea’s triumph over Italyin the 1966 group stage.

Sadly, the same reverence was not paid to another ground that disappeared in the early 1990s.

Somerton Parkwas south Wales club Newport County‘s home for 78 years. It also hosted speedway and greyhound racing, but today there is little to differentiate the red-brick housing estate which has replaced it from any other.

A couple of the homeowners have tried by sticking ‘Newport County’ plaques to their front walls, but this does scant justice to the place where East German side Carl Zeiss Jena were once the opposition in the quarter-finals of the old European Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1981.

Newport folded eight years later after dropping out of the Football League. Happily, the reformed club are faring much better, having been back in the EFLsince 2013 and now share Rodney Parade with the region’s Dragons rugby-union team on the banks of the River Usk.

One former league venue still hosting top-level sport today is the County Ground, Northampton. Football and cricket were played side-by-side at the quirky venue — the football ground had only three stands due to the other side being where the cricket pitch was — until Northampton Town moved to Sixfields Stadium in 1994.

Northamptonshire County Cricket Club stayed, an indoor cricket centre subsequently being built where the football club used to be. The only clue as to their presence here for almost a century lies in a few photos on the cricket clubhouse wall and three bricked-up turnstiles on Abington Avenue.

It is a similar story at Eastville, Bristol, though in this case an attempt was made to preserve history when Rovers departed another dual-use venue — greyhounds shared it with the footballers — in 1986.

When the site was eventually sold to IKEA after the dog-racing had also come to an end and Eastville was demolished in 1998, a decision was taken to leave one of the floodlight pylons standing for posterity.

Five years later, however, it had to be brought down on safety grounds, denying passing motorists on the nearby M32 motorway a slice of nostalgia to break up their journey.

Happily, one link with the area’s sporting past remains. The Eastville Club, once home to Rovers’ supporters’ club, still survives, tucked away in a corner of IKEA’s car park.

We finish this leg of our tour in another supermarket adorned with images of an old football ground on the wall.

Walsall’s Fellows Parkmay not feature in a multi-million-pound painting like Burnden Park, Bolton, but its loss was no less keenly felt when the Midlands club became one of the first to move in 1990. Walsall’s destination was the Bescot Stadium, a quarter of a mile away, in the shadow of the M6 motorway.

After a sale in which fans were able to snap up a square yard of the pitch for £5 and even slabs of terracing concrete for around £3, the Fellows Park site was sold to supermarket chain Morrisons for £5.75million.

Almost 35 years on, some reminders remain, such as the giant clock with a football design that hangs over the main entrance, plus archive photographs on the wall behind the checkouts, complete with an explanatory plaque.

It is a welcome touch for those wondering just why they are packing their shopping bags underneath random football action-shots from years ago.