Welwyn Garden City

Herns Way holds three thousand by the club's own count, and neither figure is hard to square with what stands there: an old stand with just over a hundred seats and a smaller patch of newer cover holding roughly the same again.

Welwyn Garden City Football Club dates to 1921, but it did not survive its first two decades intact. The original club folded in 1935, undone by money and by having no proper enclosed ground to charge admission at — the same limitation Herns Way still carries in a smaller way. Rivals Shredded Wheat FC put up the funds to bring it back in 1937, and the club that exists now took its current shape through a 1973 merger with Welwyn Garden United. It wasted no time making the point of the merger: Welwyn Garden won the South Midlands League Premier Division in its first season, 1973–74.

The best spell came much later. In 2017–18 the side went 25 games unbeaten across all competitions and 18 in the league alone, both club records, won the Spartan South Midlands League Premier Division and went up to the Southern League — the highest level it has reached. Eight months later that squad was gone. Manager Adam Fisher was sacked in January 2019, and almost the entire team and staff walked out with him, leaving three players to see out the season alone.

The Hertfordshire derby against Hertford Town is the one that matters locally, though Wikipedia records Hatfield Town as the "archrivals" of the 1996–97 season specifically. The FA Cup has never taken the club past the third qualifying round, reached in 1997–98 and again in 2005–06; the FA Vase run of 2005–06 got to the fifth round before ending on an administrative error rather than a result.