My name is Patrick McPartlin, and I’m an Edinburgh-based football journalist.

Like many people during the first coronavirus lockdown in Scotland in 2020, I struggled to find ways of keeping myself entertained outwith work. I’ve written previously about how my mental health was affected and in the process of trying to find activities to keep my mind active, I began working on what would eventually become this blog

One afternoon during the first lockdown, somebody on Twitter linked to the National Library of Scotland’s extensive online map archives. Sufficiently intrigued, I loaded up an old map from the 1890s with a view to seeing how my neighbourhood had changed over the last 100 years. Factories, railway lines, stations, warehouses – the landscape has changed immeasurably since, and I was keen to get an idea of what life might have been like a century earlier.

I began searching other areas of Edinburgh. Beyond the well-known former football stadia – Powderhall, the Royal Gymnasium etc – there were countless spaces across the city marked as football grounds. I was intrigued. How many grounds had there been across Edinburgh that we knew very little about?

I started keeping notes of rough locations and, where possible, matching them up to teams.

One thing led to another and in the latter part of 2020, I began plotting the locations of all the grounds on a Google Map, primarily with the help of newspaper archives and other historical works. Initially I restricted myself to venues that had hosted football between 1870 and 1930, figuring that employing a longer timeframe would have made it nigh-on impossible to keep track of all the grounds.

Fast-forward to summer 2021 and there are more than 170 venues marked on a map of Edinburgh & the Lothians, and over 130 on one of Glasgow and surrounding areas. Both are works in progress and are likely to have more grounds added over time.

Why do this?

I’m a history buff, and I love football. Combining the two seemed to make sense, and it was a way of keeping busy during lockdown.

There is precious little information about some teams and venues but the hours spent poring over old maps and newspaper reports has at least given some idea of just how many teams were active in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Scotland.

It hasn’t been straightforward. Some days would end with more than 10 or 15 grounds having been plotted. Others I spent hours deliberating over the exact location of a patch of grass where a short-lived team had played for a few months.

There have been several bumps in the road along the way:

• Several streets have changed names in the last 100 or so years or been demolished entirely
• Public parks were often known by more than one name
• Spelling was a bit hit-and-miss which complicates research
• Modern street names that seem to match up with historic grounds aren’t always accurate
• There are no records of grounds for some clubs, especially short-lived teams
• Not every venue was clearly marked on maps of the time
• Many works teams played games on-site, which aren’t always marked

I could go on, but the main point to highlight is that this has been a fascinating journey, discovering where football was played and the story behind team names; those that lasted the distance and those that didn’t, and the long-gone grounds remembered in street names and parks.

In identifying and locating the grounds, I was struck by the amount of detail and information available, particularly for some clubs that appeared little more than factory teams.

When this project was in its infancy, the plan was to keep it simple and limited to a map that could be used for research and reference purposes. The more research I did, the more information became apparent.

That’s when I decided that the project required something more substantial and in-depth, which is what led me to creating this blog.

As mentioned, this is an ongoing project. If you have any information about grounds or teams then please do feel free to get in touch.

Part of me hopes that this can become more than just a blog.

GET IN TOUCH

Some of the information here may be inaccurate or incomplete, or you may have information about grounds I haven’t uncovered.

If so, please get in touch on Twitter or via email.