I wrote the following in February 2025. A version of it was used as the foreword for the following month’s special edition of highly respected cult football photography publication LOWER BLOCK. This featured approximately 50 candid black-and-white pictures by Nic Salmon, taken at Scunthorpe United Football Club during the 1981 / 82 season.

You see them less often, now… Black and white photographs from the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, of some denim-clad rock star or comfy-slacked TV personality revisiting their childhood street. Except it’s lying in bits behind them. Pieces of brick and concrete and glass and rusted metal in a broken pile. They loom ahead of it all, at the front of the frame and seeming to say: “All this past has passed – and I have survived! Look how far I’ve come!” 

For many of us in Scunthorpe, an average-sized steeltown in South Humberside (as it then was), a unique opportunity to do something similar presented itself in 1988. A thin slice of time when we could stand right in the rubble to reflect.

In the mid-to-late 1980s we were playing in a ground no longer fit for purpose as the modernisation of the game began to pace up after the Bradford fire, the club itself in dire need of a way out from a typical lower league financial bind. The land where our home of almost 90 years had stood was in a prime town centre location ripe for commercial development, and so the Board of Directors sold up to a supermarket chain. They paid off the debt and commissioned a brand new ground on the outskirts, paid for with the remainder of the proceeds. 

The Old Showground was going, and the final game was played on 18th May 1988. A 1-1 draw, which saw us fail in the basement division Play Offs. Half a decade and more after Nic Salmon’s photos, but with no discernible differences in infrastructure or condition, or luck. The very next day, the demolition company moved in on the stadium.

Looking at Nic’s work ignites nostalgia, bringing forth memories of more than goals and big games. Being a lifelong fan of your football club means a reservoir to dip into – but supporters who also happen to be students of life, people and behaviour, know that the matches themselves are often the least interesting things to recall. It’s mostly the grit and the grins that linger.

Seeing the shot of manager Ron Ashman in his office, my immediate thought is of a lengthy conversation I enjoyed with him around twenty years after the photo was taken. I found him to be a friendly old boy; gentle and kind, modest, unpretentious, almost egoless. Certainly old fashioned, with a fair-minded and quite noble paternal grace. Proud of having ‘done his bit’ for Scunthorpe United FC – even more so than of having given the world the teenage Kevin Keegan, after setting him up for a successful life at the very top levels of the game. Nic’s picture expertly documents Ashman for all time with all of these qualities etched on his face. 

Ashman and The Old Showground go hand in hand for me, as I was born during the first of his two lengthy spells as manager. So thinking of him I’m immediately also whirled back to some time in 1976, a seat in the massive main stand. Sitting next to my Dad in the cold, with the wind whipping through huge, cracked and jaundiced plastic window sheeting to our side. Looking up at him watching the game, and falling in love with what he’d already been in love with for years. Perched on a dusty stool at the bar under the stand afterwards, feet unable to reach the floor, eating ready salted crisps and meeting my favourite player.

Eventually understanding that something important had been passed on.

Small, awed and home. 

You could never say that The Old Showground was glamorous. But as a child it seemed to be, with magic words naming exotic places: the Donny Road end, the Fox Street end, the 1500 Club, the Royal Hotel, Hendy Ave… By the 1980s it had declined and was difficult and downbeat, grey and just a bit grim. Everything was just that bit too old and bit too uncomfortable – ugly – but the OSG was an atypical lower league relic. It had actually been a ground-breaking stadium back in its day. The very first cantilever stand in England, erected in 1958 with materials made in the town’s proud heart, the steelworks. Even at the end it could still be an arena of joy. Big moments, small moments. On the pitch, yes, of course, though few. Mostly off it – all of the things being a football supporter are actually about… 

Nic’s pictures from 1981 and 1982 surface now, in 2025. Almost four decades in the ‘new’ stadium, and just after two or three of the most truly turbulent and emotionally difficult years in the club’s history. They capture life at the Old Showground so vividly – but I think that most of all they act as a balm to recent trauma, and allow us to once again say: “All this past has passed – and we’ve survived! Look how far we’ve come!”