To supporters, football grounds feel like cathedrals. They are where they go to worship every other Saturday, allowing an escape from everyday life and a release of the stresses and strains that they’re normally under. Whether it be Anfield or Old Trafford, Wembley or Stamford Bridge, football fans know the home of their favourite team inside out and miss it when they’re not there.
Over the years, however, there have been some big stadiums that have been closed down and are no more, disappearing from the zeitgeist never to be seen again. The are gone and, in some cases, all but forgotten to those that loved them.
White City Stadium
Perhaps the greatest example of a once loved stadium that has been lost to the annuls of time is the White City Stadium in London. It was built in order to be used as one of the primary locations for the 1908 Summer Olympic Games, hosted by the nation’s capital, opening its doors for the first time on the 27th of April that year.
Designed by J. J. Webster, it was completed in ten months by George Wimpey and located on part of the site of the Franco-British Exhibition. It boasted a seating capacity of 68,000 and cost £60,000 to construct. There was a running track 24 foot wide that was a third of a mile in length.
@tfcstadiums
Numerous events of the Summer Olympics were held in the stadium, which was later taken over by the Greyhound Racing Association and used to house both greyhound racing and speedway events. The most important event in the sport, the English Greyhound Derby, was hosted there until it closed. It was also used for the Amateur Athletics Association Championships, whilst Queens Park Rangers twice used it as their home ground.
It was eventually shutdown for usage in 1984 and then demolished the following year. Nowadays if you head to the same location you will find White City Place, which was formerly BBC Media Village.
Tower Athletic Ground
Think of Merseyside and stadia and you will doubtless think of Anfield and Goodison Park. If you know the area then you mind might also stretch to Prenton Park, the home of Tranmere Rovers. Where you almost certainly won’t consider is New Brighton, over on the Wirral. It once boasted a tower that rivalled the Blackpool Tower, with The Beatles playing there in the 1960s.
New Brighton Tower played in the Football League until 1901, with New Brighton AFC also playing in it until dropping out of it in 1951. The two of them called the Tower Athletic Ground their home, with the stadium in question being one of the biggest in the world at the time.
Able to host as many as 80,000 people, it was built in the literal shadow of the New Brighton Tower, hence its name. It was a football pitch surrounded by tracks for both running and cycling, with covered seating on both sides of the pitch and standing areas at the two ends. It was used as a depot during the Second World War and then New Brighton AFC moved into it.
The football club bought the ground in 1958, a year after the record attendance of 16,000 was set in an FA Cup third round tie against Torquay United. In 1977 the stadium was sold to the Wallasey Housing Corporation, with a housing estate standing on it nowadays.
Burnden Park
Even if you know nothing whatsoever about Burnden Park, which was once the home of Bolton Wanderers, the chances are high that you will have seen a representation of it before. That is because it was the stadium that L. S. Lowry used in his depiction of football supporters heading towards a ground in his 1953 painting Going to the Match. It opened on the 11th of September 1895, 21 years after Bolton Wanderers had been formed as Christ Church FC.
Shares were raised in order to fund the building of the new stadium once it became clear that the football club needed a purpose-built location in order to play its matches.
Burnden Park in The Love Match, with Arthur Askey, Glenn Melvyn and Thora Hird… you don't often see the railway embankment from this angle.
— Jimmy Sirrel's Lovechild (@jslovechild.bsky.social) 2024-11-25T18:38:38.477Z
I was able to host up to 70,000 people during the club’s heyday, although this was severely reduced after the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough Disaster said that all grounds had to become all-seater. By 1992 it was decided that that would be almost impossible to do at Burnden Park, so the club’s final game was played at it on the 25th of April 1997; a 4-1 defeat of Charlton Athletic.
A new multi-million pound stadium was to be built six miles away. Having been the site of a disaster in the March of 1946, part of the ground burned down in 1998 before being demolished completely a year later.
Cathkin Park
There aren’t many now-defunct football grounds that you can visit and still see the remnants of what went before. That is part of what makes Cathkin Park so special, given the fact that a visit to the literal park that exists there now will present you with the opportunity to look at some of the terracing that once encircled the pitch.
It was where the second Hampden Park was built, after the first Hampden Park was closed down and is now the site of railway lines. The second was rented by Queens Park between 1884 and 1903, with as many as seven Scottish Cup finals as well as two replays being hosted on the site.
1 of 5 #scotsfoundedfootball Today I am in Court. Not for being a rank bad yin, but to offer support to Greg Brown, as he works to save Cathkin Park for the Public. Fair play to him. Nothing in it for him. Just the establishment of a principle. pic.twitter.com/0V7SMizdsA
— Ged O’Brien (@gedboy58) July 18, 2024
Queen’s Park decided that they needed to have their own stadium, moving to the third Hampden Park about 500 yards to the south. As a result, Third Lanark took over the lease, renaming it as New Cathkin Park as they had already played at a Cathkin Park elsewhere in the city. The last match was played there in 1967, with the area falling into disrepair in the period that followed.
It was eventually turned into a park, in spite of numerous attempts by various clubs to turn it back into a football ground by the likes of the Jimmy Johnstone Academy, which gained permission to do so in 2023 but was stopped in 2024 by judicial review.