Those We Have Lost: Huish, Yeovil Town

A Fourteen-Foot Drop

“Have you still got your sloping pitch?” It is the question that follows Yeovil Town supporters around the country. The slope at Huish, the club’s home for seventy years, is now the stuff of folklore. Conservative estimates put the drop from side-to-side at six feet. Others claimed it was an eight-foot difference from corner flag to corner flag. The club’s most famous manager, Alec Stock, certainly understood its psychological power. Ahead of FA Cup ties in the late 1940s, he was happy to let the national press exaggerate its severity. By the time the newspapers had filed their reports, the pitch had a mythical fourteen-foot drop.

This legendary gradient was part of the ground’s character, a secret weapon that home players understood and visiting teams dreaded. During the Second World War, the American Army, who used the ground as an ammunition dump, offered to level the pitch to play baseball on it. The club declined. It was a wise decision, as the slope became a key component in Yeovil’s greatest day.

The Bank of England Robbery

On January 29th 1949, a club record 17,123 spectators crammed into Huish to see Yeovil Town play Sunderland in the Fourth Round of the FA Cup. The visitors were known as the ‘Bank of England’ club, their squad assembled at vast expense. For a non-league side to beat them was the modern equivalent of knocking out Manchester City or Chelsea. Yeovil won, cementing their reputation as giantkillers and putting the small Somerset town and its peculiar ground on the national map.

The cup run funded a series of improvements. The old earth banks and railway sleepers that formed the terraces were steadily replaced with concrete during the early 1950s. The cover at the Queen Street End was removed, while a new roof was put over the North Terrace on the side. The entire process of concreting three sides of the ground cost just over £5,000. It was not until 1962 that the ground took its final shape. The original 300-seater stand, moved from the club’s previous Pen Mill home in 1920, was demolished. In its place rose a new £60,000 Main Stand with seating for 2,000, new dressing rooms, a boardroom, and a long supporters’ bar. The bar became a social hub for the town, hosting dances and bingo nights, and the income it generated began to pay back the club’s investment.

The Price of Progress

For the next 28 years, Huish remained largely unchanged, save for the addition of crush barriers and segregation fences. The ground, which originally stood on land owned by Brutton’s Brewery, was fit for purpose as the club battled for election to the Football League. But the world was changing. The Football League was ending its archaic election system in the 1980s, introducing automatic promotion for non-league champions. Suddenly, the slope that had been Yeovil’s greatest asset became a major liability, a barrier to entry. The Main Stand was also showing its age, with rust appearing in its supports. The club faced a choice: pay for expensive maintenance or sell up and move.

The last full house came in January 1988, when 9,717 watched Queens Park Rangers win 3-0 in the FA Cup. By then, the decision had been made. On March 21st 1989, the club received planning permission for a new out-of-town stadium on the site of the former Houndstone Army Camp. A little over a year later, on May 5th 1990, a final home match against Telford United brought the curtain down on seventy years of history.

Bulldozers moved in and Huish became a Tesco supermarket. Yeovil Town moved to their new ground, retaining a link to the past by naming it Huish Park. The move was not without drama, as spiralling construction costs and complicated land valuations nearly bankrupted the club three years later. Many supporters still talk about the old place with great sentimentality. It had a character that many of the identikit grounds built in the early 1990s, including its successor, simply lack. The old turnstiles ended up at Exmouth Town.

For years, the only reminder of what once stood on the site was a weathercock on the supermarket’s clock tower, depicting small metal figures of footballers. Even that is gone now, though it was salvaged. It is now fixed to the exterior of the Copse Road end at Huish Park, a small, tangible piece of a ground etched into memory.