The Fratton Park Story

From Farmers’ Fields To Field Of Dreams: The Fratton Park Story

By Colin Farmery, Chair of the Pompey History Society

In early 1898 the land immediately west of Fratton Station on Portsea Island was exploited largely for market gardening, criss-crossed by a network of semi-rural lanes. The now familiar light industrial and urban sprawl towards Milton, then to all intents and purposes a village, was but a twinkle in a town planner’s eye. But the catalyst to spark this concrete, brick and tarmac revolution was arguably the most significant and iconic building constructed in Portsmouth during the 20th Century: Fratton Park. This is its story.

Early Years

On April 5, 1898 six business and sportsmen met at 12 High Street, Old Portsmouth to start a professional football club, agreeing to buy approximately five acres of agricultural land close to Goldsmith Avenue for £4,950. In the next 12 months the ground was levelled, drained and turfed. A 240-foot long stand was constructed on the south side of the stadium and to the north a 100-foot stand built. Cinder terracing was laid around the rest of the enclosure.

On September 5, 1899 Fratton Park hosted its first game, a friendly with Southampton, whose success, along with that of the local Royal Artillery Club, had piqued interest for top-class football in the city. The first Southern League game against Reading attracted a 9,000 crowd and generated receipts of £263. By early 1900 the new ground was complete with the final construction costs totalling around £16,000. Turnstiles, dressing rooms and committee rooms were also installed. The stadium was quickly regarded as being one of the most wellappointed south of London and the club thrived, winning the Southern League in 1902 and in 1903 Fratton Park hosted an England international game against Wales.

Not that the Directors’ rested on their laurels. Fratton Park was given a facelift in 1905. The mock Tudor building familiar to us today was built, including an impressive clock tower and balcony. This was a gift from Director Sir John Brickwood, a local brewer. The architectural style is similar to many of Brickwoods’ public houses in the area, as his house architect Arthur Cogswell came up with the design. One such pub was built adjacent to the imposing new entrance in Frogmore Road. The pub wasn’t there just to serve thirsty fans coming to games. The tight-knit terraced houses and rectangles of roads – Carisbrooke, Apsley , Alverstone and Ruskin, among others – were springing up at a rate.

An attendance record of 27,000 was set for the English (FA) Cup tie with The (Sheffield) Wednesday in 1909, but Pompey were soon to face a familiar foe: financial crisis. In 1912 relegation to the second division of the Southern League meant expensive railway trips to the mining communities of South Wales and the club teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. There were even fears it could fall into the hands of property developers, eyeing up the land for lucrative residential.

The worst was avoided and a newlyconstituted club bounced back to win promotion at the first attempt, shedding

the salmon pink colours of the club’s origins and opting instead for blue shirts and white shorts, with the City’s star and crescent emblem for its crest. By now the South Stand had a capacity of 1,028 seats, but a whirlwind caused significant damage to it in 1916. Football was significantly constrained for the war, but the women’s game continued to flourish in Portsmouth with several games staged at Fratton Park. Baseball even came to Fratton Park in 1918 the US Army beat the Canadian Army 4-3 in front of a largely bemused crowd, which raised funds for the British Red Cross.

Building for Success

In 1920, the year the Portsmouth Property Association was founded, Southern League clubs, including champions Pompey, en masse joined the newly-created Football League Division Three. Promotion to the second division was achieved in 1924, the same year the touring All Blacks beat Hampshire 22-0 at Fratton Park in a Rugby Union match. Pompey’s promotion encouraged the club’s directors to prepare for what they hoped would soon be first division football. In April 1925 the original South Stand was demolished and work began on a new £20,000 stand. With 100 construction workers involved in the project, the new stand was complete by August. At 360-feet long the new stand saw the clock tower and balcony demolished and part of the old mockTudor pavilion incorporated into the underneath. There were seats for 4,000 in the upper tier and a lower standing enclosure holding 8,000. Glazed panels provided natural light at the rear of the stand.

The stand was constructed on the back of a £24,000 bank overdraft, guaranteed by the Directors and designed by Archibald Leitch, who incorporated his ‘trademark’ crossiron frontage to the stand. Their confidence was well founded and in 1927 Pompey gained promotion to Division One and two years later the Milton End was reterraced bringing the capacity of Fratton Park to 40,000. The north west corner was quickly dubbed ‘Boilermakers’ Hump’, as men of that trade in the Dockyard tended to congregate there. Pompey were also FA Cup finalists that year, losing 2-0 to Bolton at Wembley.

In another historical aside, aviation pioneer Amy Johnson kicked off a Portsmouth schools’ match in 1930 attracting a 10,000 gate. The club’s continuing success saw its overdraft reduced to around £13,000 in the same year. Three years later numbered shirts were worn for the first time in England in an international trial match at Fratton Park. In 1934 Pompey were back at Wembley only to lose 2-1 in the FA Cup final to Manchester City, but in the same summer centre-half Jimmy Allen was sold to Aston Villa for a then British transfer record of £10,775. The money was reinvested in the construction of a new covered North Stand. Again Leitch was the architect, but the stand was a more functional affair, bending to the track of Milton Lane giving it the still visible kinked roof-line. Leitch envisaged the upper tier of the stand being seated, but the Directors preferred additional capacity, so it was standing room only.

Fratton Park’s capacity was now 58,000 and the 1934-1935 accounts revealed the total cost of the stand was actually £7,000. That capacity was never to be fully tested, but in 1939 new record attendance of 47,000 saw an FA Cup tie with West Ham United. Pompey made it to Wembley again, this time triumphing over much-fancied Wolves 4-1, to become the first club south of London to win the Cup. When war was declared football continued in a limited form, with gates severely restricted in case of air raids. Indeed in 1941 ‘enemy action’, according to the club’s record book, forced the abandonment of a War League match with Brighton.

On the cessation of hostilities, the country’s appetite for live sport was emphasised and in 1945 when Fratton Park hosted a boxing tournament, attracting around 10,000. As sport flourished, the Olympics came to London in 1948 and Fratton Park hosted a game in the football tournament between Holland and Ireland. Holland won 3-1. Pompey were also building towards golden glory themselves and in that same year Chairman Richard Vernon Stokes challenged the team to win the league in their club’s Golden Jubilee season. They did and repeated the feat in 1949-50. In February 1949 a crowd of 51,385 – a record attendance – saw the FA Cup sixth round tie with Derby County. Pompey won 2-1 and reached the semi-finals, but hopes of a famous league and cup ‘double’ were dashed by second division Leicester City.

In 1951 Leitch’s original concept for the North Stand came to fruition and 4,200 seats were installed in the upper tier and the lower terrace was re-concreted and new crash barriers installed. The Festival of Britain included a display at the ground by the Portsmouth Ladies’ Physical Culture Club, attracting 12,000. More than 30,000 attended a reserve team game in 1952 as vouchers are distributed for a forthcoming FA Cup home tie. In 1953 Fratton Park staged its first floodlit game – the lights installed on the four corners of the north and south stand roofs – as Pompey draw 1-1 with neighbours Southampton. That busy year also saw England legend Bobby Charlton make his international debut at Fratton Park, scoring twice for England schools, while the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was celebrated with a Tattoo, including marching bands on the pitch.

The ‘Station End’, so called because it was the closest to Fratton Station, by the mid-1950s was increasingly cramped and lacking basic facilities. In 1955 the Board unveiled plans unveiled for a new stand to replace the long-standing cinderterraced original.

Before it could be completed, Fratton Park hosted the first Football League floodlit match in February. Pompey lost 2-0 to Newcastle, then in August 1956 the two-tier, concrete Fratton End was opened, built at a cost of £40,000. Floodlit football was also here to stay and in 1962, as Pompey emerge from a dismal period as third division champions, which had seen them fall from the first to the third divisions in just three seasons, four floodlight pylons were constructed to replace the lights on the top of the stands. The 120-foot towers cost £14,000 and were paid for by funds raised by the Pompey Supporters’ Club.

The Start of a Search

Even as the land around Fratton Park closed in – behind the Fratton End was now a rail goods yard and to the north the NAAFI building and various light industrial units, the Board of Directors still assumed keeping Fratton Park spruce was the club’s future. In 1964 a £17,000 re-vamp of the North Stand was announced and in 1968 the wooden seats in the South Stand were replaced with plastic ones. But in 1969 plans for an East-West relief road in Portsmouth were revealed by the City Council and its proposed route was through Fratton Park. The search for the a new stadium had begun. Little could we have known this pot-boiler would continue to bubble for the next half century. At once a new £2.5m stadium was mooted on the site of the then Portsmouth Airport, which was scheduled to close by the mid1970s, but this site would eventually be used for houses and light industry in the early 1980s. The relief road never saw the light of day. Fratton Park’s capacity was 46,000, but as the club passed into the hands of Southampton property developer John Deacon in 1972, it was at a low ebb. Marooned in the second division, Fratton Park had its lowest attendance for a league match

in December of that year, 4,688 passing through the turnstiles for a game with Middlesbrough.

The initial enthusiasm engendered by Deacon’s spending spree on the pitch – the white shirts the club adopted were less popular – saw attendances rise. In January 1974 Fratton Park hosted its first-ever Sunday match, an FA Cup tie with Orient, which attracted more than 32,000. In response to pitch invasions by young fans after goals, during that summer the club installed dry moats in front of the Fratton End and Milton End goals. The move cut the capacity to 42,000. The moat at the Milton End is still evident to this day. Soon Deacon’s finance was running short as the property market of the mid-1970s crashed, so sweating the Fratton Park asset to get much-needed cash in was the name of the game. In 1975 the ground hosted a poorly-attended pop concert with Georgie Fame topping the bill and a year later a more successful beer festival there saw 3,600 pints drunk during the event. By 1978 Pompey were in the fourth division, and only escaped that division by the skin of their teeth on the last day of the 1979-80 season. As Pompey readjusted to life back in Division Three, Deacon mooted hosting a professional rugby league team at Fratton Park, but the idea was rejected by fans.

Football was changing and in 1983 after a significant pitch invasions in the last two home games of the previous season, when Pompey won promotion to the old second division, fences were installed around the perimeter. This is also a response to the increased level of socalled ‘football hooliganism’ which had been on the rise since the late 1960s. A series of fences also spilt the terracing into compartments at the Milton End and the concept of an away section – exclusively for fans of the opposing team – was born. Fratton Park’s 36,000 capacity had been tested to the limit in January 1984 when Southampton were drawn at home in the fourth round of the FA Cup. In October that year, the New Zealand international side played at Fratton Park, claiming the honour of travelling farthest to play a game there.

Architect Archibald Leitch’s trademark Criss Cross beams.

Consequences of Tragedy

Across England, decades of underinvestment in stadia came home to roost in 1985 and Pompey were affected by the fall-out. In that summer emergency fire safety work took place on the wooden North and South Stands as a result of the Bradford fire in May, which claimed the lives of 56 fans when the main stand at the Valley Parade ground went up in smoke. Additional escape routes are constructed and as a result the distinctive Leitch steel criss-cross frontage was covered up. Twelve months later upper tier of the concrete Fratton End was condemned reducing the stadium’s capacity, along with other safety constraints, to 28,000. In 1988 new club owner Jim Gregory completely revamped the North and South Stands, replacing the old asbestos cladding with a light alloy material. The South Stand enclosure was also re-concreted. The condemned upper tier of the Fratton End was demolished.

In January 1989 Gregory announced plans for a 24,000 capacity ‘tradium’ on the site of the soon-to-be vacated goods yard to the west. The concept included a mix of retail and light industry on the site to help fund it – hence the name. The stadium would have been located approximately where the current B&Q store and car park stands. Arguably this remains the biggest ‘missed opportunity’ for the club to relocate. The Hillsborough tragedy that year, which saw 96 fans crushed to death on an over-crowded terrace in April, would lead to the Taylor Report, compelling all first and second division teams, including Pompey, to have all-seater stadiums. The search for an alternative to Fratton Park was underway in earnest. Pompey’s plan had changed as the tradium idea got bogged down. After negotiations with the city council, which produced a special report detailing the

Plans for new stadiums or a re-built Fratton Park have come and gone.

pros and cons of half a dozen potential locations for a new stadium, in 1992 Gregory put forward plans for a 24,000 all-seater stadium at Farlington, close to the A27 and nearby marshes.

Baptised ‘Parkway’, owing to plans for a station with park and ride facilities being part of the scheme, the plans were narrowly approved at a controversial City Council meeting in October that year. There had been strong Conservative opposition and the then Tory government planning minister decided to ‘call-in’ the scheme for a public inquiry. In December 1994 the planning review was published rejecting the scheme. The disruption to migrating Brent Geese caught the headlines, but the potential congestion caused by the stadium and associated retail outlets was the primary reason for the rejection

Chairman Gregory was in failing health and he handed over control of the club to his son Martin. In August 1996 Fratton Park, after a dispensation for several years as the parkway plan rumbled on, finally became all-seater stadium. Seats are bolted onto the south stand enclosure concrete and also eight rows of seats were bolted to the Milton End and North Stand concrete terraces. Capacity was reduced to less than 8,000. That same summer, Martin Gregory ‘sold’ the club to recently resigned England manager Terry Venables for just £1. By November additional seats had been added to the north terrace and Milton End, bringing the capacity to around 14,000. With the newly founded Premier League generating previously unheard of money for the top clubs and grants for stadium improvement all the rage, grounds are being refurbished or relocated across the country.

Pompey were in danger of being left behind, having missed promotion to the new top flight by just a couple of goals in 1993. In 1997 plans, originally conceived in 1995, for a new 4,500 seater Fratton End were revived as well as a new scheme to extend the roof of the North Stand. Construction started at the end of the season and the new north cover was ready by August and the new Fratton End opened in October. Ground capacity was now around 19,000.

Almost 9,000 attended an England Women’s international game against Portugal at Fratton Park in 2002; a then record attendance in England for the women’s game and in 2003 Pompey, now owned by Serbo-American Milan Mandaric who had bought the club out of administration after it almost collapsed from its debts in 1999, guided the club to the Premier League under manager Harry Redknapp and his sidekick Jim Smith.

Future Dreams

With Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal now due in town, additional seats infilled corners and other spare areas to bring the capacity to around 20,000. The requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act had also seen a wheelchair section incorporated into the new Fratton End. Mandaric announced plans to rotate Fratton Park by 90 degrees in 2004. Funded by luxury flats on site, the existing Fratton End would be extended to create a new West Stand, a new two-tier East Stand would be built 30-40 metres or so further away from the houses on Alverstone Road and a new North End would be built. A truncated South Stand would become the away end. The capacity of 28,000 was mooted.

The stadium was to be part-funded by building 400 flats on land to the west. Milan infamously even posed on a digger with a hard hat behind the North Stand. The planning application got mired in issues around the mains cable running under the proposed development and the viability of the residential development meant it soon died a death. Mandaric had at least acquired significant parcels of land to the west and north of the stadium, which made a redevelopment feasible.

In 2006 Mandaric sold the club to Franco-Russian businessman Sacha Gaydamak, who immediately embarked on a modernisation of the South Stand, but his vision did not have the club’s heritage at its heart and he saw the club’s future away from Fratton Park. With Pompey now riding high in the Premier League, Gaydamak announced plans for a new state-ofthe-art 36,000-seater stadium to be built on land to be reclaimed close to the dockyard. The plan immediately attracted criticism, not least from the Historic Dockyard, which hadn’t been consulted on moving a major tourist attraction in HMS Warrior. In the end security concerns, given the scheme was so close to a military base, meant it was abandoned. As a sticking plaster for Fratton Park, in August the so-called ‘hanging baskets’ were inelegantly grafted onto the upper tier of the South

Stand and the Milton End was covered for the first time. The capacity of Fratton Park now stood at around 21,000.

In 2008 Pompey were FA Cup winners and played the mighty AC Milan at Fratton Park in the UEFA Cup. Gaydamak had also come up with an alternative scheme for a new stadium, this time at land on Horsea Island at the north end of the M275 on redundant Ministry of Defence land. Swanky Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron come up with a striking design. There were immediately issues over who pays for the required link road from the motorway and, besides, the Gaydamak empire was about to implode, almost taking Portsmouth FC with it. Anyone wanting to see what Pompey could have won, then take a visit to the new Bordeaux stadium built for the 2016 Euros, which is a scaled up version of the Pompey design.

When Pompey became England’s biggest community-owned club in 2013, albeit now relegated three times in four seasons to League 2, the capacity of Fratton Park was slashed to 18,100 on safety grounds. A backlog of planned maintenance needed to be addressed and it would be funded by the proceeds of a side part of the takeover deal which would see a Tesco store be built behind the Fratton End goal. Live music even returned to the stadium in the summer of 2015 when Madness topped the bill at a concert which saw more than 11,000 fans attend. The £3m received from the superstore development was spent prudently on realigning walkways, staircases and installing prosaic things like sprinkler systems and re-wiring. In 2017 significant work to underpin the south east and north east corners of the respective stands was undertaken, bringing capacity back up to around 19,400.

In the summer of 2017 fans voted to sell to Tornante, a company owned by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. One of the key factors in the vote was the promise of additional capital resource to definitively resolve the should-theystay or should-they-go dilemma of the club. Some of that capital muscle was brought to bear in the summer of 2019 when the club spent more than £1m on re-cladding the South Stand and strengthening its structural integrity. It was a complex project, involving lengthy negotiations with the residents of Carisbrooke Road, to allow scaffolding to be erected in their back gardens which backed directly onto the rear wall of the stand.

That summer work also saw work begin dismantling the club’s floodlight pylons. The two pylons to the north had been redundant since September 2015 when additional lamps had been fitted to the North and Milton stand roofs. The 2019 South Stand works saw banks of lamps added to that stand’s roof, making the two southern pylons surplus to requirements from a lighting point of view. Contacts with a number of agencies however meant the pylons situated in the north west corner were carefully dismantled and re-erected in the club’s car park.

A programme to shift assorted aerials onto the re-situated pylon is underway and should be complete by the summer of 2020 when the final standing pylon in the south east corner will be taken down. There are also plans for a new TV gantry to be built on top of the South Stand, designed with a nod to Leitch’s trademark criss-cross, at the same time.

After nearly two years of discussions, in early 2020 the club unveiled a scheme to revamp the Milton End – incorporating at long last long-overdue facilities for the disabled – which has more than a nod to the club’s iconic Cogswelldesigned frontage in Frogmore Road. The club has also been working closely with the City Council on medium to long-term plans to redevelop the North Stand, as well as the wider area to the north of Fratton Park. This would require more than a little cooperation and investment from other stakeholders, not least Network Rail, operators of Fratton railway station, to ensure access to any expanded stadium is adequate and aesthetically commensurate with the scale of ambition for any development.

No one can under-estimate the challenges ahead, the prospect of a Fratton Park fit for the 21st Century and a capacity of 25,000+ to enable the club to punch its weight is on the agenda once more. However, Pompey fans of almost any age have been round this block before, some of us more than once. If history teaches us anything, nothing is certain until the diggers move in and the hard hats are donned. Even then, don’t take anything for granted…

This abridged article has been kindly provided by the Pompey History Society, a charitable organisation set up to preserve and conserve the archive of the club. To find out more about the organisation and how you can support it email history@pompeyfc.co.uk