Fratton Park
Fratton Park is a football ground in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, and is the home of Portsmouth Football Club. Fratton Park's location on Portsea Island is unique in English professional football, as it is the only professional English football ground not located on the mainland of Great Britain. Fratton Park has been the only home football ground in Portsmouth F.C.'s entire history.
Fratton Park was built in 1899 by Alfred H. Bone, a Portsmouth-based architect, surveyor and a founding director of the football club. The site of Fratton Park was formerly a market garden potato field in a Portsea Island farming village named Milton. By 1904, the village of Milton and the rest of Portsea Island had become part of the borough of Portsmouth.
Portsmouth's football ground was deceptively named as "Fratton Park" by the club's founding directors, to persuade supporters that the new Milton-based football ground was within walking distance of neighbouring Fratton's convenient railway station; the true distance between the railway station and football ground is actually one mile, or a ten-minute walk.
Fratton Park was first opened to the public on Tuesday 15 August 1899. The first ever match at Fratton Park took place on the afternoon of Wednesday 6 September 1899, a 2–0 friendly win against Southampton, attended by 4,141 supporters. Three days later, the first competitive home match at Fratton Park was played on Saturday 9 September 1899, a Southern League First Division 2–0 win against Reading, attended by 9,000 supporters.
Sir John Brickwood was Portsmouth's founding chairman. Brickwood, owner of a Portsmouth-based brewery, was also a philanthropist. In 1900, the Brickwood Brewery opened a mock-Tudor public house named The Pompey next to Fratton Park. In 1905, a mock-Tudor club pavilion was donated by Sir John Brickwood and built to the north of The Pompey pub. The pavilion, designed by Alfred H. Bone, originally had an octagonal clock tower spire on its roof. The pavilion was used as club offices and the players changing rooms.
Fratton Park's capacity was expanded to 58,000 supporters in 1935 after the North Stand and North Terrace were rebuilt, but was reduced to 52,000 to follow new safety laws introduced after the Burnden Park disaster of 1946. The highest recorded attendance in Fratton Park's history was in Portsmouth's first First Division championship winning season of 1948–49 with a crowd recorded at 51,385 on 26 February 1949, for an FA Cup sixth-round match vs Derby County, a match which if Portsmouth had won, could have led to them achieving the rare Double of winning both the FA Cup and First Division titles in the same season.
On 26 July 1948, Fratton Park hosted a Netherlands vs Ireland first-round football game in the 1948 London Olympics, one of only two grounds outside London to host matches in the Olympic football tournament. The game at Fratton Park was attended by a crowd of 8,000, with a 3–1 win to the Netherlands.
On 22 February 1956, Fratton Park became the first English football ground to stage an evening Football League match under artificial light, against Newcastle United. The original 1956 floodlights, positioned at opposite ends on top of Fratton Park's South Stand and North Stand roofs, were replaced in 1962 by floodlight tower pylons in the four corners of the ground.
Fratton Park's four corner floodlight towers, erected in 1962, became well known in Portsmouth and also acted as a useful landmark for visiting away supporters. Since 2015, the four towers were gradually replaced by modern roof-level lights. One surviving floodlight tower, from the north-west corner, was renovated and relocated to Fratton Park's main car park on 15 July 2019 for preservation, albeit without its lighting lamps, which were not required and removed. The preserved floodlight tower now also acts as a telecommunications antenna tower.
Fratton Park was used as part of the 70-day long London 2012 Olympic Torch Relay route. The Day 59 relay route began on 16 July 2012, with Portsmouth F.C. steward and D-Day veteran John Jenkins as runner number 001, carrying the Olympic flame onto Fratton Park pitch. The Day 59 torch relay route then set off from Fratton Park, through Portsmouth and eastwards to Brighton & Hove.
Fratton Park is affectionately nicknamed "The Old Girl" by Portsmouth supporters or "Fortress Fratton" or "PO4" by the broadcast media and has a reputation for high attendances and a powerful atmosphere, similar to that of larger capacity stadia. Fratton Park's maximum capacity has been reduced to 20,867 since it became an all-seater ground in 1996. Several relocations plans proposed during the 1990s and 2000s failed to materialise.
Layout
Description
Fratton Park is built in a traditional English style with four separate stands of varied designs and sizes and arranged closely around the four sides of the football pitch. The pitch measures 115 × 73 yards, and is aligned from east to west, which is considered unusual in English football, as most other pitches are orientated north to south to maximise natural sunlight.The stadium has a capacity for 20,867 supporters, although it has had a much larger maximum capacity for 58,000 supporters after the construction of the North Stand in 1935. Fratton Park's record attendance is 51,385, reached in an FA Cup quarter-final match vs Derby County, on 26 February 1949, in which Portsmouth won 2–1.
The four stands in Fratton Park are named The North Stand, The South Stand, The Milton End and The Fratton End. Before the reconstruction of the present Fratton End in 1997, the terraces of the two previous Fratton Ends, the Lower North Terrace and Milton End were conjoined as one continuous horseshoe-shaped terrace for much of Fratton Park's twentieth century history.
Along the northern touchline of the pitch is the two-tier North Stand, the largest stand in Fratton Park. The North Stand was rebuilt and reopened as a full standing stand on 7 September 1935, increasing Fratton Park's maximum capacity to 58,000 supporters. However, the stadium capacity was reduced to 52,000 for safety reasons after the Burnden Park disaster of 1946 and 4,226 seats were fitted to the upper North Stand terracing in 1951. The lower North Terrace was also fitted with seats in 1996. A new roof extension, supported by steel columns, was added from the front of the North Stand in 1997 and extended over the North Terrace to the pitch touchline. The North Stand turnstiles are accessed from Milton Lane. A gravel surfaced car park is a recent addition to the rear of the North Stand. The current 'Pompey Shop' merchandise shop and ticket office are located directly behind the North Stand car park in Anson Road.
The current South Stand has two tiers and was opened on 29 August 1925 and is currently the oldest stand in Fratton Park. It replaced an earlier and smaller South Stand that existed on the site between 1899 and 1925. The current 1925 South Stand was designed by the famed Scottish architect Archibald Leitch. The entrance to the South Stand is in Frogmore Road and is notable for its mock Tudor façade, which is a remnant of a grand mock Tudor pavilion structure, with a clock tower, that previously occupied the site from 1905 before the current South Stand was built in 1925.
At the eastern end of Fratton Park is the Milton End, the smallest stand. The original Milton End was known as the Spion Kop, and was enlarged to its current size in 1949. Infamously, the Milton End was the only roofless stand in the Premier League, before a roof was added before the 2007–08 season. The Milton End is used by visiting 'away' supporters, with turnstiles in an alleyway named Specks Lane, directly behind the Milton End.
At the western end of Fratton Park is the single tier 4,750 seat Fratton End, which first opened on 31 October 1997 and is the newest and tallest stand in Fratton Park. The Fratton End also had an official opening ceremony on 4 April 1998, timed to coincide with a home match that was one day before the centennial anniversary of Portsmouth F.C. on 5 April 1998. The current Fratton End replaced an earlier two-tier Fratton End built in 1956, which had its upper tier condemned in 1986, for structural reasons, with the upper tier being demolished in the summer of 1988, leaving a significantly smaller terrace behind the goal. The remaining lower tier of the Fratton End was demolished nine seasons later in 1997 to clear the land for the building of the current Fratton End stand in 1997. The Fratton End turnstiles are accessed from Frogmore Road.
Fratton Park name and location
Despite its Fratton Park name, the ground is not located in the Fratton area of Portsmouth, instead it was built in Milton in 1899. Fratton Park is actually named after the nearby Fratton railway station and not the geographic area of Fratton of Portsmouth. This peculiar misnaming has caused many of Portsmouth's residents and football fans to incorrectly assume that Fratton Park is located in Fratton, and not in Milton.Fratton Park was built in 1899 on a plot of agricultural land in Milton, a small rural village on the east side of Portsea Island. The plot of land was originally a market garden to the north of Goldsmith Avenue and was purchased by Portsmouth FC from the Goldsmith farming family in the autumn of 1898. At the time, the late nineteenth century village of Milton still retained a remote, rural and isolated feeling from the busy town of Portsmouth, and had no railway station of its own, the nearest being located one mile to the west in Fratton, in the centre of Portsea Island.
The boundaries of Portsmouth were changed in 1904 to include the entirety of Portsea Island, thus making Milton and Portsea Island's other towns and villages all part of the town borough of Portsmouth. Portsmouth would later expand onto the mainland and achieve city status in 1926.
Ironically, on 28 May 1912, Portsmouth's town council bought the remaining Milton Farm land from the Goldsmith farming family, and on 11 July 1923 the council opened a public recreation park named Milton Park in Milton, only 127 metres to the east of Fratton Park on Priory Crescent.
The east stand of Fratton Park is named the Milton End, an acknowledgement to the actual village of Milton that the football ground was built in.
The former nineteenth century villages of Milton and Fratton are now residential areas of the present-day city of Portsmouth, the physical boundaries of the two former villages are now blurred by the modern-day urban sprawl of the city of Portsmouth. However, Milton and Fratton still have defined official boundaries; Milton and Fratton are physically separated by the Portsmouth Direct line railway line, they have separate political voting wards and also have distinctively different postal codes.
If Fratton Park had hypothetically been built in the Fratton area of Portsmouth, its postal code would begin with PO1 5**. However, Fratton Park retains a PO4 8RA Milton postcode and not the PO1 area postal code of Fratton and Portsmouth's city centre.
By coincidence, Fratton Park's PO4 8RA postal code contains the RA abbreviation of the late nineteenth century precursor Royal Artillery Portsmouth FC, sometimes known as RA Portsmouth.