Hello and awright troops!
It is summer 2022, and I’m in Scotland.
(In case that wasn’t blazingly obvious already.)
Anyway, we’ve just left Glasgow Central on a local commuter train
and we’re heading 4 stops south to a station called Mount Florida.
Because hidden away in a city park just a few minutes from here,
overgrown with trees, and weeds, and general rubbish,
are the ghostly remains of an old stadium.
But what was this place? What happened to it? And why is it still here?
Welcome to the legendary Cathkin Park.
So we’ve got off the train at Mount Florida, and some viewers
– particularly those of you who like tartan and armies –
will already know this station.
It’s the stop that you get off at
if you want to go to Scotland’s national football stadium, Hampden Park.
This is where you would come if you’re going to one of Scotland’s home games,
or the Scottish Cup Final,
or the 2002 Champions League final, when Zidane scored THAT goal.
And tonight, it’s even more / less exciting
(depending on your point of view):
they’ve got Coldplay.
- Tonight, here at Hampden, Coldplay will be performing to 50,000 fans.
And of course, we’re not here to see any of that.
What we’re interested in is not what’s down that end of the road,
it’s what up this end.
From the outside you would never guess what is hidden inside of this park,
but we’re about to step back through time,
into 140 years of Scottish sporting history.
I think I can see a stadium…
This is, or at least was, Cathkin Park stadium,
which opened back in 1884,
and used to hold up to 50,000 fans of its own.
And although the sweeping old grandstands
have now half-disappeared under a small forest,
they once witnessed some of the biggest games in Scottish football,
including cup finals and international matches.
But for most of Cathkin Park's history, it was home to Glasgow’s great lost football team,
the mighty Third Lanark Athletic Club.
And if you’ve never heard of Third Lanark,
that might be because they went out of business more than half a century ago.
But these terraces are where thousands of their fans would have stood cheering them on,
on a Saturday afternoon.
And their home colours of scarlet red can still be seen, proudly painted, on the old metal railings.
Ok you know what I’m going to say. But this place is amazing.
It is amazing. I love it.
What really hits you here is the sheer size of the old grandstands.
By modern standards they’re not that big,
but in those days they really packed people in,
so this was a huge stadium for its time.
Which makes you think:
if Third Lanark were big enough to play somewhere like this,
how did they just disappear?
Well it has to be said, even in their glory days,
Third Lanark never completely filled the place,
but they were still a pretty big club;
they were founder members of the Scottish football league in 1890,
and in their early years they could compete with Celtic and Rangers,
winning two Scottish Cups and a league title by 1905.
After that they began to fall behind the big two
- much like everyone else in Scotland -
but they were still a regular top division side,
and spent most of their time battling with teams like Queen’s Park, Clyde, and Partick Thistle
to be the biggest club in Glasgow (that isn’t Celtic or Rangers).
But then it all went horribly wrong in the mid-1960s.
After finishing in third place in 1961,
a new owner took control of the club, called Bill Hiddleston.
And if your club has ever been run
by a shameless money-grabbing parasite
who’s only interested in bleeding the business dry for their own personal profit...
they are NOTHING compared to this guy.
Hiddleston immediately started asset-stripping the club;
their star players were sold off, and the money just vanished.
Three years later, the team finished bottom
after a disastrous season when they lost 21 games in a row,
and relegation to Division Two saw their financial problems spiral out of control.
Within two more years they were bankrupt
and the whole operation was liquidated.
The last professional match here at Cathkin
was a 3-3 draw with Queen of the South
in front of just 325 fans
on 15th April 1967.
But hang on. Something doesn’t add up here.
Did they really build a stadium like this for a team that
- with all due respect to surviving fans of Third Lanark -
most people these days have never heard of?
Well no.
Third Lanark were not the first team to play here,
and Cathkin Park wasn’t always called Cathkin Park.
It had a previous life.
And it was originally called, wait for it...
Hampden Park.
And yes I know, we just walked past Hampden Park a few minutes ago,
how can this be Hampden Park too?
Well long story short, there have been three different Hampden Parks,
all three of them in different locations.
So to explain all of that,
we’re going to have to look at a map.
The original and first Hampden was built way back in 1873
by Scotland’s oldest football club, Queen’s Park FC.
And they gave it the name Hampden Park
because it was located on a road called Hampden Terrace,
which was named after a London-born politician called John Hampden,
- Hello!
Which means Scotland’s national stadium is named after an English person.
- Goodness me!
Anyway, the site of the original Hampden is now home to a lawn bowls club,
but right here, they hosted some of the earliest international games between Scotland and England,
including a glorious 5-1 win for Scotland in 1882.
But of course, they’re not going to bang on about it.
(For 140 years.)
However, the stadium only lasted for ten years
before someone built a railway right through the middle of it
- Hoots mon! How's that happened?
and both Queen’s Park and Scotland needed a new home.
No problem, they found another site a few hundred metres to the east
and built a new Hampden that was bigger and better than the first one.
And that stadium was this!
Cathkin Park started life as the second Hampden Park.
And as Hampden, it hosted 9 Scottish Cup finals, six Scotland international games,
and the 1896 rugby union international against England,
until Queen’s Park decided, nope, we’re going to need an even bigger stadium,
and they built the third and current Hampden Park,
which they moved into in 1903.
But with Queen’s Park and Scotland now playing at the third Hampden Park,
that left the second Hampden Park vacant,
and at this point our old friends Third Lanark
– who until then were playing in a small stadium in a neighbourhood just north of here –
saw an opportunity to upgrade their home.
- Are you not using that?
- Not any more.
- Can we buy it?
- Och aye, why not.
They bought the venue second-hand off Queen’s Park, and moved in soon afterwards.
But of course, they couldn’t call it Hampden Park any more
because Hampden Park was now Hampden Park.
- Why can’t you lot think of a new name?
- Why do you sound like an English person trying to do a Scottish accent?
- Never ye mind.
So instead, Third Lanark simply renamed it after their old ground they’d just moved out of,
which had been called:
Cathkin Park.
So we’ve now had three different Hampden Parks,
two different Cathkin Parks,
and one stadium that’s been both.
Anyway, you already know what eventually happened to the unfortunate Third Lanark.
But if there hasn’t been a league game here for half a century…
why is the stadium still here?
Let’s face it, even the most historic football
grounds don’t get preserved at the end of their life;
usually, the land is sold off and everything’s demolished for housing.
And that’s what was supposed to happen to Cathkin.
Hiddleston, in a classic Hiddleston move, sold it to housing redevelopers
who then discovered the site was legally reserved for recreational activities
and they couldn’t do anything with it.
As a result, the abandoned stadium just stood here empty for years,
with occasional use from amateur teams
or local kids playing cricket on the pitch.
Predictably, it was vandalised,
the main grandstand on one side burned down,
and by the 1980s the structure had become so unsafe
that Glasgow council had to get rid of most of it
leaving behind just the concrete bowl that you see today.
So we’ve got to the part of the video where I normally say something like:
is there any chance Cathkin Park could come back to life one day?
Well, it’s probably not going to happen,
but there is a chance.
There’s a Third Lanark phoenix club currently playing in the Central Scotland Amateur League,
which is several steps down the pyramid,
but their dream is to return to professional league football here at Cathkin.
They actually played a few of their amateur games here,
and then for complicated legal reasons they had to move out again,
so let’s face it, it’s all a long way off for the moment.
In the meantime though, there’s a youth team called the Jimmy Johnstone Academy
who have taken up residence here and look after the pitch,
and there’s a group called Cathkin Park Ltd
who do their best to maintain what remains of the stadium itself.
If some of the paintwork here looks surprisingly recent
it’s thanks to those two organisations,
and I’m beginning to think a few of them might just be Celtic fans.
But ultimately, all that matters is that the place is being kept alive,
and as long as that continues, there is possibility,
however tiny,
that one day Third Lanark and Cathkin Park could come back.
Until then, it’ll just be the single greatest abandoned football stadium in Scotland.
And given its historical importance, maybe even the world.
- What a place. What a place!
If you’d like to visit Cathkin Park,
it’s a ten minute walk from either Mount Florida or Crosshill station.
Mount Florida is the one to go to if you need step free-access,
and if that’s you, you’ll want to go round the park and enter from the north side
where it’s a lot flatter than the way I came in.
And as always, thank you all for watching,
and I will see you soon.