Ben Ransom, a Charlton fan, has visited 51 stadiums that have been or will soon 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, Lost Grounds, airs on Sky Sports on Sunday evening.
Ransom's journey began with a remarkable discovery in Plumstead, south-east London, where he knocked on the door of a random house after someone found old terracing from Arsenal's former Woolwich Arsenal ground. The residents showed him to their back garden, where the terracing still stood. He realised he was 100 yards from the first house he 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,” he said. Instead, he chose Charlton, a club that spent large chunks of his childhood homeless, squatting in the stadiums of neighbours.
A pilgrimage into nostalgia
Ransom described the trip as “literally a pilgrimage” and a chance to get lost in nostalgia. “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,” he said.
He contrasted the quirky, rickety old grounds with modern stadiums. “It’s going into the toilet and having a pee on a bit of a concrete wall with foliage growing at you,” he recalled, adding that the old Wembley's bench-like seats and exposure to the elements were part of the experience.
“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,” he said.
Memories kept alive
Despite the improvements in modern stadiums, Ransom noted that the idiosyncrasies of old grounds stir emotion in memory. He found that many people who now occupy the spaces where grounds once stood still hold memories or want to learn about them.
In Middlesbrough, the housing estate built on the site of Ayresome Park was laid over the footprint of the pitch, allowing residents to see where their house was in relation to the stadium. A local artist has placed sculptures around the estate, including an old jumper tied on a fence where a goalpost was and a football boot marking the centre spot. There is also a memorial to the North Korea team who beat Italy there at the 1966 World Cup, located in someone's front garden.
A visit to Millmoor, the former home of Rotherham United, offered a “snapshot in history.” In Brighton, celebrity fan Norman Cook and Seagulls royalty Jack and Adam Hinshelwood recalled fond memories of the Withdean athletics stadium, the club's home from 1999 to 2011 after two years in exile in Gillingham.
A step towards the present
Ransom described the Withdean as “the theatre of trees,” a nickname coined by Adam Hinshelwood. “I think for Norman he’s probably looking back through rose-tinted glasses,” he said. “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.”
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. All episodes will also be available on the Sky Sports Football YouTube channel.
