 | FOOTBALL IN ENGLAND |
| FOOTBALL IN ENGLAND |
You can contact me to order a full-size high-quality image.
Please if you would like to add anything to the text of each image or to correct an error.
HOLKER STREET - BARROW AFC
Barrow is a town on the Furness peninsula in the north-west of England. The club has a major claim to fame in that they originally played at the Strawberry Ground, named of course in honour of His Nibs, but for the greater part of their history they have played at the Holker Street ground.
The club formerly had a professional team playing in the English Football League, but without much success and were voted out of the League in the early 1970s. During the late 1960s and early 1970s when I was at school I followed a couple of other relatively unsuccessful Football League teams, but I never actually made it up to this neck of the woods in those days. So finding myself with an hour or two to spare on a windy February morning, my glamorous assistant and I went off for a peek.
On our way up to the ground we were confronted by a length of corrugated asbestos painted in the club's colours, such was the wind, so we had no idea what to expect. Football grounds of former professional teams having fallen on hard times are not renowned for their maintenance.
But here at Holker Street we were pleasantly surprised by what we saw. The ground was in good condition all round - nice, bright, painted, and clean. The members of staff who we saw were extremely sociable and graciously allowed Liz and me to wander unsupervised around the ground.
There's plenty of room around the perimeter of the pitch, and in the speedway boom of the early 1970s a speedway team known as the Barrow Bombers (descendants of the more famous Romford Bombers) raced here on a track that was almost a quarter of a mile long around the pitch. Not as long as the legendary long track that was the Crewe Kings speedway track that encircled a cricket pitch, but I digress.
The ground capacity here is currently set at 4007 yet there were as many as 6002 fans here in 1988 for a cup game. The ground record is 16,874 for an FA Cup match in 1956, and that number could easily fit in here today if the average modern football fan wasn't such a wimp and the nanny state hadn't taken control.
There's something to be said for being packed tightly like sardines into a football ground for a major football match. The atmosphere is terrific. These Health and Safety nutters evidently have no idea and their stupid regulations are killing off the game, if you want my opinion. Anyone insisting on the idea of all-seater stadia has totally lost the plot and just hasn't a clue as to what football is really all about.
This site is divided into four sections.
Choose a section from the links below
There are more links at the top and bottom of each page.
These concern the administration of the site, but you should visit them just the same.
about this site | audience participation | copyright notice | technical issues | accessibility statement | read this | contact me
©