Giant Axe, Victoria Bottoms, The Dripping Pan and The Ewe Camp - these are some of the greatest grounds in British football  ...

In a world where even Wessex League stadia have corporate names, they are a throwback to a completely different era, grounds which conjure up evocative images of a far more innocent age.
The Ewe Camp, home of Isle of Arran League club Northend Thistle. Pic by Mike Bayly.The Ewe Camp, home of Isle of Arran League club Northend Thistle. Pic by Mike Bayly.
The Ewe Camp, home of Isle of Arran League club Northend Thistle. Pic by Mike Bayly.

Bracken Moor, Ironworks Road, The Rock, Garden Walk, Earls Orchard, Victoria Bottoms, Giant Axe, The Wellesey and - gloriously, memorably - The Ewe Camp, The Old Spotted Dog and The Dripping Pan.

Just eleven of the 100 venues - ranging from the Premier League to the Isle of Arran League consisting of only five clubs - featured in a truly wonderful new book, ‘British Football’s Greatest Grounds’, which Santa, bless him, delivered down my chimney a few days ago.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The strapline is ‘One Hundred Must-See Football Venues’, and leafing through the 288 lavishly-illustrated pages that is a boast from author Mike Bayly which is hard to ignore.

The Dripping Pan, home of Lewes. Pic: Paul Paxford.The Dripping Pan, home of Lewes. Pic: Paul Paxford.
The Dripping Pan, home of Lewes. Pic: Paul Paxford.

I’ve been to 20 of them, so I’m a fifth of the way there. Two of them - Bath’s Twerton Park and Marine’s Rossett Park (now formally known as The Marine Travel Arena) - I’ve been to in the last couple of months covering Hawks’ FA Cup run for this newspaper.

Twerton Park is a classic traditional non-league ground, with open terraces at either end and wonderful, tall floodlight pylons in each corner, the sort which have now disappeared from Fratton Park.

Some Pompey fans were sad to see the pylons taken down, and as a football traditionalist so was I. There is nothing wrong with maintaining links to the past. Thankfully, there are many superb pylons in Mike Bayly’s book - Peterborough, Grimsby and Morton, to name just three - and may they illuminate games into the year 3000 and beyond.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Marine’s ground does not have huge pylons, and for one obvious reason - there is no room for them. Their cramped ground only has three sides - the dugouts are literally inches away from back gardens, as Jose Mourinho will soon discover in one of the most romantic FA Cup ties of all time.

Mill Road, home of Arundel FC. Pic: Paul Paxford.Mill Road, home of Arundel FC. Pic: Paul Paxford.
Mill Road, home of Arundel FC. Pic: Paul Paxford.

If he looks closely enough, he will also see numbers attached to the netting which runs the length of the pitch, so everyone knows which house to knock on to get any stray balls back - a wonderful idiosyncrasy, of a kind that make non-league football so appealing to so many.

Though most of the 100 grounds featured are non-league/grassroots, 21 belong to Premier League or EFL clubs. That is understandable - the likes of Anfield, Old Trafford, Villa Park and Goodison are sporting cathedrals, they demand inclusion, while the new stadia at Tottenham and Arsenal showcase the best of the 21st century stadiums.

Of the 92 clubs that make up England’s top four divisions, more than a third play in grounds that have been built since 1990. Others - Yeovil, Barnet, Chesterfield - are on show in the top flight of non-league football.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Thankfully, there is no place for the new grounds that lack architectural merit (and, for that matter, tall floodlights) - such as Leicester, Southampton, Colchester and Doncaster. Shrewsbury’s old Gay Meadow would have been a contender, surely, for the book; their replacement, the all-seater Montgomery Waters Meadow, thankfully not.

Christchurch Meadows, home of Belper Town. Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images.Christchurch Meadows, home of Belper Town. Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images.
Christchurch Meadows, home of Belper Town. Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images.

Bayly’s book, while a cracking read for any true football fan who enjoys a bit of travelling, has also encouraged me to alter my perceptions about a certain group of football followers.

Back in the mid-1990s, when I was working in the west country, the Devon League organised its Easter Bank Holiday weekend fixtures for the benefit of ground-hoppers. For the uninitiated, the hoppers are viewed as football’s equivalent of trainspotters - ‘anoraks’ is the derogatory term often used - in that they ‘collect’ grounds, usually non-league and grassroots.

For some, this appears more than just a hobby; a guy called Ansgar Spiertz has been to over 2,000 grounds, including over 100 in England - and he lives in Germany! The Devon League groundhop - with games on Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Monday - attracted hoppers from the Netherlands as well as from all corners of the British Isles. They gloried in their eccentricity.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

In another life, long before I joined the Portsmouth News, I once wrote: ‘In one way I admire their (hoppers) love of the game; in another they leave me cold. Football, surely, should be about the passion, the glory, the despair, the unlikely victories, the totally shocking home defeats.

Twerton Park, home of Bath City. Photo by Harry Trump/Getty Images.Twerton Park, home of Bath City. Photo by Harry Trump/Getty Images.
Twerton Park, home of Bath City. Photo by Harry Trump/Getty Images.

‘It shouldn’t be about just standing there watching Topsham v Plymouth Parkway in the morning before going on to Teignmouth v Newton Abbott and Ivybridge v Alphington, chalking off the grounds like numbers on a bingo card.’

Though I still stand by the first paragraph, I’ve now revised the second. Reading ‘British Football’s Greatest Grounds’, I now want to visit some of those stadia myself. After all, it’s not that far to The Dripping Pan (Lewes, in Sussex), Pilot Field (Hastings), Beveree (Hampton & Richmond) or Clarence Park (St Albans). And two of those venues proudly take their place in the top four in Bayly’s book (and that’s the only spoiler you’re getting).

All these years on, reading about The Old Spotted Dog (Clapton) and The Dripping Pan makes me yearn to become a bit of a hopper myself. A love of football, local history, social history, architecture, geology, geography and hopefully cups of Bovril can be a heady cocktail!

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Ok, I’m never going to visit all of those 100 grounds. I have no wish to traipse up to the Isle of Arran - though I’m sure a trip to The Ewe Camp, home of Northend Thistle, would win me a few ‘likes’ on social media! Causeway Lane is another unlikely one unless Gosport or Havant draw Matlock away in the FA Cup and I can wangle it on expenses. But some of the southern ones ….

Through my parallel lives of a football journalist and a football fan, I’ve been to over 150 grounds (I’ve seen Exeter City play at more than 100 different venues, losing at most of them sadly). That’s not a bad list, but ‘British Football’s Greatest Grounds’ has given me a new injection of lower league wanderlust.

In a post-Covid landscape, one of my fervent hopes is that more people go and watch their local non-league team.

A big fear is that if they don’t, one day venues like Victoria Bottoms and The Old Spotted Dog might be lost forever …