Holker Street

Barrow-in-Furness is a town in Cumbria. Holker Street has been there through most of that town's twentieth century, taking its football since 1909, when the ground first opened.

The name on the gates has not always been the name in the ledger. In recent years the ground has carried sponsors' titles — the Furness Building Society Stadium, and then the SO Legal Stadium — while the older name stayed in use among the people who walk to it. That is the pattern here: the commercial name changes, the street name does not.

The street in question is Wilkie Road, in the LA14 postcode, and the address gives no house number at all — the ground simply occupies the space, in among the terraces, the way grounds of that vintage tend to. It is a natural grass pitch, and it holds a little over six thousand, which for a town of Barrow's size means the ground fills in a way larger stadiums rarely do.

Anything you want to know about Holker Street you find on the club's own pages, at barrowafc.com. For a ground more than a century old, that is not neglect so much as arrangement — the club is the ground, and the ground has never been anything else.