Holy grounds: A pilgrimage to football’s spiritual homes | Football

There was never really any doubt Ben Ransom was the right man to hunt down the ghosts and memories of England’s lost football grounds. But if confirmation was needed, it came on a trip to a nondescript residential street in Plumstead, south-east London.

‘Someone had found some old terracing from one of Arsenal’s old grounds – from when they were Woolwich Arsenal. So we knocked on this random person’s door and they were like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got some terracing here” and showed us through to the back garden where sure enough there’s some terracing, which is remarkable,’ he says.

‘And when I worked out exactly where I was, I was basically 100 yards from the first-ever house I lived in as a baby. I was born in that part of the world and I couldn’t believe I was literally that close, I had no idea. I could have been an Arsenal fan.’

Instead, Ben chose Charlton, or Charlton chose him. So perhaps it’s no surprise a fan of a club who spent large chunks of his childhood homeless, squatting in the stadiums of neighbours, should develop an obsession for old grounds, some famous, some largely forgotten.

In all Ben visited 51 stadiums which either have been or soon will be consigned to football’s past, from Ayresome Park and the old Wembley, to Kenilworth Road and Burnden Park.

The first installment of the five-part series will air on Sky Sports on Sunday evening and it’s clearly been a labour of love.

Ben adds: ‘All these grounds are buried in housing estates and terraced houses and underneath cement and all this sort of stuff. It just takes you back to a bygone era and that’s what I loved about this trip. It was literally a pilgrimage and it was so great to get completely lost in the nostalgia of the whole thing.

‘Obviously, you go into any beautiful new state-of-the-art bowl and you think “oh, this is nice” but to me, all my best memories as a kid going to football, visiting all these away grounds was the quirky places, the walking into the back of Kenilworth Road through the terraced houses, which you’ll only be able to do for another two seasons.

‘It’s going into the toilet and having a pee on a bit of a concrete wall with foliage growing at you.

‘It’s the seats at the old Wembley, those bottom-tier seats that were almost like benches, the issue of being exposed to the elements.

‘All of that was part of the experience of going to these rickety old grounds. The concrete terraces, the old floodlights that you don’t see at many grounds anymore. To me, it just heightened the senses around the experience. That is what we’re missing, I think, sometimes.

‘That’s what football used to be. It was an adventure just getting in the ground, wasn’t it? At Brentford, finding the right road and the right terraced houses that you had to kind of walk through to get to the turnstile. Working out which end was the home end. It wasn’t just as simple as walking around the stadium bowl.

‘But there were so many things that were terrible about it. Like now you can sit in a seat and you can watch the pitch and the roof covers you and you don’t get wet. Generally speaking, there’s enough toilets at half-time.You’re not queuing for 20 minutes.

‘So stadiums have got better, there’s no doubt about it, but those idiosyncrasies are what stir that emotion in the memory, aren’t they?’ And while the stadiums are gone, the memories have been kept alive by those who experienced them or those who occupy the spaces left behind.

As Ben found on an odyssey which took him from housing estates to retail parks. ‘What was great was many people engaged with those places because I guess, you know, football grounds are, forever, aren’t they,’ he explains.

‘They are all about memories and moments and smells and all that kind of stuff. And the fact so many people who were using the space for something completely different, still kind of either had those memories or wanted to learn about those memories was quite special.

‘Most people had a vague idea but a lot of them looked at us a little bit blankly like, “Yeah, there used to be a football ground here but I’ve lived here for ten years!” But you’re never far away from someone going to have a little nose around what’s there now.

‘In Middlesbrough, on the site of Ayresome Park, they built this housing estate but the plans were laid over almost the footprint of the pitch. So you could see where your house was in relation to the stadium.

‘And since then, a local artist has been commissioned to place sculptures at various points around the estate. So here’s like an old jumper tied on a fence where one of the goalposts was. Or the centre spot is marked by an old, like, football boot. Plus there is a memorial to the North Korea team who beat Italy there at the 1966 World Cup. It’s in the front garden of someone’s house, which I absolutely love.’

A visit to Millmoor, the former home of Rotherham United which stood untouched until very recently, offered a ‘snapshot in history’ but not all the old grounds conformed to the stereotype of terraces, rickety turnstiles and towering floodlights.

A trip to Brighton saw celebrity fan Norman Cook and Seagulls royalty Jack and Adam Hinshelwood recall fond memories of the Withdean athletics stadium, the club’s home from 1999 to 2011 after two years in exile in Gillingham.

‘Adam calls it “the theatre of trees”, which was brilliant, it was exactly that,’ says Ben. ‘I think for Norman he’s probably looking back through rose-tinted glasses.

‘But just getting Brighton back in the confines of Brighton was the big thing. It was a step towards getting to where they are now and gave them platform to be the Premier League team that they are.’

That’s football in a nutshell. Reaching the pinnacle is the ultimate goal but the soul of the game will always be buried just beneath the surface, rooted firmly in the past.


A new episode of Lost Grounds will be shown every week straight after Super Sunday on Sky Sports Premier League. The first episode goes out at 7.30pm on October 11. You can also watch all episodes on the Sky Sports Football YouTube channel or just click the link.

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