Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 23 October 2012

23 October 2012

Last Easter, Middle-Aged Diary owed his son an outing. For want of any better options, I took him to watch Wigan against Stoke. We went by train, walking through time-worn Victorian buildings, even the evidence of attempted regeneration now looking limp. A part of a town like many others in northern England, in other words.

Finally, we reached a cordon sanitaire of car parks, separating the grimy old town from our destination, the brightly gleaming edge-of-town shopping centre to which no-one walks except to get beyond it to the stadium, built in the same style, in the same development. Any town, anywhere - by happenstance it was Wigan.

In the 1930s, authors and commentators noted that amid the evidence of industrial decay and poverty, prosperous new banks sprang into life. In the early 21st century, it is football stadiums. They bear the most remote relationship to their host community. To the extent they are enabled by retail developments, to the extent they rely for their funding streams on discouraging supporters from staying in the town until kick-off but to instead drive through the town and buy their refreshments at the ground, that relationship is parasitic. The club ceases to be part of the town.

What does this have to do with Grimsby Town? Nothing, I hope. My views are coloured by the fact that I have never learnt to drive and uncoloured by any more than general knowledge of planning and urban development. However, following the appointment of Stephen Marley as a special adviser to the board, promising no more false starts over the Mariners' stadium plans, it is timely to remember that the concept of a community stadium could, should, mean something. It means working with existing, local businesses, the council, sports and other local groups to ensure that a new ground enhances rather than detracts from what North East Lincolnshire already has to offer.

Modernisation need not mean rampant commercialisation.