Lost Grounds: Bradford Park Avenue – England’s forgotten international location

Once an integral part of the towns and cities they called home, dozens of the country’s football fields have disappeared over the past thirty years. They all took with them a wealth of memories for generations of supporters.

But what happened next? The Athletics traveled the country to find out, visiting a slew of residential areas, retail parks and even the odd hospital along the way.

The kick-off to our four-part series, which runs every Tuesday in August, is perhaps the most moving of them all: Bradford Park Avenue. Park Avenue has been home to a League club for 62 years and county cricket for over a century. It is a forgotten and abandoned place, with one of the few visitors in the last ten years being an archaeological dig…

When you look up at a row of turnstiles that once led to a football ground where England played an international match, it is as if time has stood still.

‘5/-‘ is painted high on the wall, indicating an entrance fee of five shillings in old money. Around the corner are a few more bricked-up entrances, along with a giant rusting iron gate topped with nails to deter anyone trying to get in for free.

A men’s toilet block is also clearly visible at the back of a bench where supporters last stood more than 50 years ago, while a walk inside reveals two huge overgrown terraces and a crumbling outer wall that once stared over the lumpy remains of a pitch . graced by greats such as Stanley Matthews and Len Shackleton.

Also buried among the bushes that have been given free rein are two floodlight masts, plus a mountain of sporting memories. Welcome to Park Avenue, Bradford, the forgotten home of the former Football League club of the same name and now the haunted domain of Mother Nature.

At a time when the demolition crews seem to spring into action as soon as the gates close for the final time at major sporting cathedrals such as Highbury, Roker Park and White Hart Lane, this one-off sporting mecca is truly a throwback.

Not only is the cricket ground where Yorkshire played for more than a century until 1996, albeit in a semi-derelict state, but plenty remains of the adjacent football side – the two sports shared a main stand, designed by leading architect Archibald Leitch – to leave devotees of a certain vintage misty-eyed.

Cricket on Bradford Park Avenue in the summer of 1949 (S&G/Getty Images)

Park Avenue has always been regarded locally as superior to Valley Parade, home of Bradford City – once of the Premier League and now of League Two. For starters, it had coverage for 14,000 and a capacity of 37,000. The train station and tram line, located where the ornate Grand Mosque now stands across Horton Park Avenue, transported thousands of fans to and from the area in little time.

Then there was the corner pavilion, which visitors called the ‘Dollhouse’. This charming two-storey building served a similar purpose to Fulham’s Craven Cottage, housing the football club’s dressing rooms and committee room, where officials could watch the matches from an upstairs balcony.

This could not save it, however, as Bradford’s fortunes declined significantly as the Swinging Sixties entered the following decade.

Voted out of the League in 1970, the club hung on in the Northern Premier League for another four years before going bankrupt with debts of £57,652 ($73,580 at today’s exchange rates). By this time the football ground had been sold to a property developer, with Avenue playing their final season in the city at Valley Parade.

Bradford Park Avenue, as seen in 1955 (George W. Hales/Getty Images)

A restrictive covenant stipulating that the land could only be used for sports and recreational activities saw the football field eventually wither and die, even after the city council stepped in to buy the site with grand plans to build a sports complex.

By 1980, Leitch’s ornate main stand had become so unsafe that it had to be demolished. The news sent a wave of nostalgia through the city, as hundreds of fans flocked to the old ground for one last look.

One pensioner was even helped to the weed-infested Canterbury Avenue End and left, leaning unsteadily on a rusting crash barrier, to stare silently over what must have felt like an unkempt grave.

Tim Clapham, supporter since 1963 and now club historian, was among those who made one last pilgrimage before the wrecking ball claimed not only the 4,000-seat Main Stand and its distinctive three gables, but also the Dolls House and the roof of Horton Park End. .

“Only the half-time scoreboard remained, and even the old social club was sold to a local pig farmer,” says Clapham. “What a sad time. So many showed up, hoping to take away a memento, something to remember the ground by.

“Some wanted the ‘BFC’ letters engraved on the center facade of the stand, while others liked the two coats of arms at either end. But when they came down, these things were much bigger than they had seemed. You would have needed a truck to take them away!”

As Bradford mourned for a second time the loss of a venue that not only hosted an England international against Ireland in 1909, but also the fastest ever goal in the Football League (four seconds, Jim Fryatt against Tranmere Rovers in 1964), cricket was at least survived.

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That was until 1996, when Yorkshire County Cricket Club chose to focus primarily on Headingley as their home, with a small number of matches also being played in Scarborough each season. Others to lose their status as out-grounds were Middlesbrough, Harrogate and Hull, where part of the MKM Stadium now sits on the old Circle cricket ground as the dual home of Hull City and rugby league club Hull FC.

Park Avenue had become a shadow of its former self long before the final County Championship match against Leicestershire in 1996.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletics)

What anyone who remembers Park Avenue in its heyday would think of the old site in 2024 is anyone’s guess. The cricket ground has been returned to the first-class level in recent years, allowing the Yorkshire second team to return and play the occasional match.

But the area is in a sorry state. Where the grand-looking pavilion once stood until the late 1980s is now just a wasteland and where Fred Trueman, Ray Illingworth et al would plot the downfall of visiting batsmen, now lies three-metre-high bushes. Time is a formidable opponent when sports arenas are left to their own devices.

Just in front of it are a few dilapidated rows of chairs, quite a few destroyed and all battling the weeds that are gradually creeping through the concrete steps. Elsewhere it’s a similar story, with enclosed areas of crumbling terraces interspersed with banks of vegetation.

The only bright spot is a mural featuring England spin bowler – and local hero – Adil Rashid, which was painted to mark the launch of the Hundred competition in 2021. But even that is fading and adding to the run-down feeling of a ground once considered the jewel in Yorkshire’s cricket crown.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletics)

What remains of the old football field is no less depressing, even considering how its abandoned state enabled an archaeological dig in 2015 that unearthed all kinds of fascinating artifacts.

The loot, captured for posterity by the Breaking Ground art project, included shoe studs, coins, marbles, target hooks and even a diaper pin. The latter, it turned out, had to do with the elastic in goalkeeper Chick Farr’s shorts snapping during a match, forcing the coach to make an emergency repair. Farr never survived the episode and was regularly showered with pins when he was between the posts.

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Hopes that Bradford would ever return to their spiritual home were ended when a cricket school (now a gym) was built on half of the old football ground in 1988. A new Park Avenue club was formed the same year and their home has been in use for almost three decades. was Horsfall Stadium, an athletics venue located a few miles away from this old ground.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletics)

On the cricket side, however, it was only a few years ago that grand plans were unveiled to return Yorkshire to their old stomping grounds via an ambitious £5.5 million revamp.

The first phase saw the opening of a state-of-the-art changing area, outdoor nets and a scoring hut in 2017, with England and Yorkshire team-mates Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow and Rashid among those cutting the ribbon. The nets, built between what was the halfway line and roughly the penalty area of ​​what was left of Avenue’s old pitch, were converted into an indoor facility last year.

The rest of the original plan – a community pavilion with dressing rooms that would have been on the side of the site of the original, a restaurant with seating for 250 guests, 1,000 spectator seats and security fencing – was never realized. As a result, the mooted return of county cricket to the city of Bradford never materialized. Instead, York joined Leeds and Scarborough on the roster at Yorkshire’s home ground.

That could be the final nail in the coffin for any hopes of bringing professional sport back to this corner of Bradford. All that remains now is the ghostly presence of the past, along with the abandoned turnstiles and terraces where only worms and weeds lived for the past fifty years.

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(Top photo: Richard Sutcliffe, Tim Clapham)