Stadiums, parks & pitches

Having spoken with Chalder about this before I'm still struggling with just how little football is to be watched - or played - within Stranraer itself or the county of Wigtownshire. It's also remarkable that what does take place is either in the Scottish League itself or in the South of Scotland League, the sixth level of football in Scotland. Isn't there any other Saturday afternoon football in the vicinity? Has there been more in the past?

Mind you, I'm saying this from the perspective of the south west of England as opposed to the south west of Scotland. Although we might consider ourselves to be a peripheral area far from the main centres of population we have to remember Devon has over a million people. This equates to around 20% of the Scottish total. Cornwall has half Devon's population; in other words around 10% of Scotland's. These comparisons would be beyond the ken of most people down here. Whether the two counties have 30% of the number of football clubs in Scotland remains to be seen.

I've been trying to make other comparisons and reckon East Devon (which does not include Exeter) has a similar population to the whole of Dumfries and Galloway whilst covering only an eighth of the area. The largest town is Exmouth. That's around the size of Dumfries; another fact that might surprise a few people.

Of East Devon's towns Honiton is nearly as large as Stranraer and has a team playing at the tenth level of English football. So does Axminster. So does Sidmouth. Ottery St Mary play at a step below. But this area doesn't neatly cluster together populations along the lines of Wigtownshire's near 30,000 (not that this figure is particularly widely-quoted). I reckon parts of Mid Devon do with the leading football team at Crediton and others playing district league football in six or seven nearby villages. Given village football is contracting across the island we share that's a diminished number but still pretty healthy in my book.

The difference is that, even in a relatively rural part of England, you can put populations of 30,000 together far more easily. The Devon and Exeter League might be considered far-flung but is compact when compared to anything in the south of Scotland. I imagine that - for a fourth, fifth or sixth club to flourish in Wigtownshire - they'd need to compete in a league spread across several counties for the numbers to be anywhere near viable. It's hardly surprising that this is a near-impossibility - as well as being unattractive to most players - and that, for any other football to occur, it probably needs to be played in relatively impromptu fashion on artificial surfaces during the evenings. And that, it is being said, is what might happen to much of our recreational football too.

Not Dartmouth although it is in England with a certain (albeit relatively limited) resemblance to the Clyde as well as the Mersey and the Tyne.

Rather than detectives you'd be better off with polar explorers.

Plymouth? There was a time when you could have split hairs and said it was Devonport, a quite separate place altogether.

That finished with the First World War. When local government was re-organised in the late 1880s both Devonport and Plymouth became county boroughs. East Stonehouse - the bit in between - fell under the new Devon County Council and, as such, was policed differently. This resulted in comparitively relaxed moral standards being tolerated in the Union Street area which linked Plymouth and Devonport. Collectively Devonport, Plymouth and Stonehouse were known as the "Three Towns". Jon Gibbes, the Torquay United historian of your acquaintance, has unearthed press cuttings of Edwardian Torquay teams venturing off to play games in the "Three Towns". Eventually it was the military, arguing the case for emergency planning during the war, that encouraged the process of amalgamation which was already under discussion.

And, to a large extent, it was the Second World War that did for Devonport as a commercial and shopping centre in its own right. It had remained a rival to Plymouth but, such was wartime damage and the plans for central Plymouth so grand, the old shops and buildings were never replaced. Yet, if you walk around the area (as I did on Saturday), you can see how the urban landscape doesn't comply with normal patterns of development. Modern Plymouth isn't quite a polycentric city, in the nature of Stoke-on-Trent, but still makes for a fascinating exploration.

Scott of the Antarctic was literally born across the road from what is now the Argyle ground. The goalposts are in Devonport Park looking across the Tamar to Torpoint and Cornwall. Ask an old football fan about Devonport and they'll tell you that all the Argyle hard nuts used to congregate in the Devonport End.

And now Home Park itself. Or more specifically the Mayflower Stand.

I’ll not go into too much detail. There’s plenty of information online and in publications such as Simon Inglis’s The Football Grounds of Great Britain. Argyle’s original main stand was built before the Great War – back in the days of the Three Towns – and replaced in 1930. The new one was destroyed during the next war. The third stand, known as the Mayflower, lasted from the early 1950s until a couple of years ago. By that time the rest of the ground consisted of single structure, built by the Scottish firm Barr, dating from the early 2000s.

I first sat in the Mayflower on Boxing Day 1969. I’d been to bigger grounds by this time but, in our neck of the woods, this was the largest football stand for miles and miles around. Over the years it was to see a fair few changes including the conversion of its standing enclosure to seating. Then, when one of Argyle’s periodic new owners took over, the message was that the Mayflower was outdated and needed to go.

The plans were grand but were gradually scaled down. When push came to shove it became apparent that millions could be saved by salvaging concrete and steel from the existing structure. An entirely new build became a refurbishment keeping closely to the existing – but not entirely satisfactory – dimensions. It was partially open to season ticketholders for the first time on Saturday and will be fully functioning by January.

Indeed, the Millbay Park hedge has gone. 

I'm sure there are images online that show Argyle were intending to make the Mayflower longer and possibly fill in the corners. They have now opted to put in a new administration and changing rooms block in the Barn Park corner leaving the Devonport corner empty at present.

One nice feature is that the old turnstile block has been converted into the club shop.