Thirty years since the last competitive game at Ayresome Park, Alan Deamer revisits Teesside
You can’t hear the Holgate roar anymore. No Bovril, no rattling turnstiles, no floodlights cutting through the fog. Just a housing estate built over history. But if you know where to look, Ayresome Park still speaks. Libero’s Alan Deamer returns to Teesside to retrace the ghost ground’s legacy.
When Middlesbrough FC set aside £1,750 for a new stand, they needed value – but also vision. They turned to Archibald Leitch, the Glaswegian architect shaping stadiums across Britain. His design for Ayresome’s new North Stand was a statement of intent: 274 feet of steel and brick, built for noise, passion and packed terraces. From 1903 to 1995, It became a gathering point for generations.
Ayresome’s most famous game didn’t involve Boro at all. It came during the 1966 World Cup, when rank outsiders North Korea stunned Italy with a 1-0 win. A first-half goal from Pak Doo-ik dumped the Azzurri out and sent shockwaves through football.
Locals, caught up in the drama, embraced the Koreans as their own, following them to Goodison Park for their quarter-final against Portugal, where Eusébio ended the fairy tale. The bond forged that summer lingers still. For a brilliant retelling, check out the awesome documentary, The Game of Their Lives.
So, what’s left of Ayresome? One night in late ’95, not long before the ground was demolished, a few fans made one last pilgrimage. They spotted turf just inside the locked gates and reached through to grab a piece. A security guard caught them, but instead of throwing them out, he let them in. They sprinted across the pitch, ending up at the Holgate End. One of them took a strip of grass, unknowingly from near the spot where Pak Doo-ik scored his famous goal in 1966.
That square of turf still survives, lovingly cared for in an Eston garden. That fleeting act of preservation captures something essential about Ayresome. The Holgate. Leitch’s North Stand. The Chicken Run, a tight, raucous terrace where voices rose in unison and visiting sides quickly learned that Teesside wasn’t for the faint-hearted.
All are gone now. In their place: a street called The Midfield. No cigarette smoke. No programme sellers barking out line-ups. Just parked cars and drawn curtains. Still, fragments remain. Cobbled streets. Old alleyways. A weathered Boys End News sign still clings to the wall.
And here and there, subtle markers, part of The Trophy Room, a public art project by Neville Gabie. As Ayresome faded into memory, Gabie worked to root its legacy in the very foundations of the estate that replaced it.
Overlaying historic stadium plans onto the new development, he pinpointed key locations – the centre circle, penalty spots, touchlines – and marked them with bronze casts and inscriptions. A pair of boots by a front door. A ball set in concrete. For those who know, they form a quiet trail through the past. For others, they blend into everyday life: ghostly whispers of a ground that once stood here.
If you head to the Riverside Stadium, you can even walk through the Ayresome Park gates to your heart’s content, overlooked by England legends Mannion and Hardwick. A stadium can be bulldozed, but its meaning doesn’t vanish. Memories of Ayresome come back and illuminate conversations. In fading ticket stubs, in the way it’s spoken about decades later.
Even the Ayresome Angels, once a fixture in the stands, are still sung about today in terrace chants. In nearby Albert Park, a statue of Brian Clough stands quietly. As a young man, he walked through the park to reach Ayresome. Now he stands watch, a reminder of where greatness began – and what the ground meant to those who passed through it.
