Complete: Bath City's traditional total football experience

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Dave Harry

Supporting images: Tom Reed

Ken Loach’s 2002 film ‘Sweet Sixteen’ gave a debut to Martin Compston and was a study on the freewheeling letdowns of a life trying to escape poverty.

Liam, Compston’s character in the film, buys a caravan as a haven for his mother, soon to be released from prison but the new purchase gets burned down by a lad who he thought a friend.

Loach is a Bath City supporter patently and aware of the escape that community football can be at this caravan of love, providing comfort and rickety pleasures at Twerton Park since 1932.

Bath City are going for promotion in the National League South and fan-owned, the only ownership model that could really work here.

In an impact report, the club’s Foundation noted that Twerton is within “the most deprived 10% nationally”, that Twerton men “are likely to die nine years earlier than men in wealthier parts of Bath” and that “35% of children in Twerton lived in poverty” in 2020/21.

©Dave Harry/ Terrace Edition. Ken Loach stencil. Twerton.

It would be hard to imagine a club that didn’t try to eat into those stark figures and that is what Bath City does, via its outreach programmes, that offer football to kids and a “Reconnecting Twerton” scheme which supports a group of 18 men and women whose ages range from 64 to 98 and who live within three miles of the ground.

It’s not enough to operate a football business, with lip-service gestures to the community you make money from. This club has to be the people and the people the club and that is what Bath City is.

Britain hides its poverty well but this football outfit, just a mile or so from the tourist haunts of a city of obscene property prices, doesn’t allow that disconnect to continue in silence.

Loach was involved with the “Big Bath City Bid” to raise money for the community buyout in 2015 whose promotional video was replete with montages of “Mascot Man”, the old Bath City talisman with his black and white striped tailcoat, top hat and whirling umbrella on the sidelines at Twerton.

The gates in the 60’s glory years were huge, with 18,020 in Twerton Park for a 1960 FA Cup round Third Round match against Brighton and Hove Albion.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Bath City FC.

Even though attendances have shot up and sunk back down over the years (as low as 500 odd by 2014/15) the club has been an ever present and Loach pointed to the reassuring continuity in an interview with the Athletic, saying “"I made my debut for Bath in the late 1970s period and the first thing that strikes me now is that the stadium looks barely any different.”

In 2012, the club held a raffle for the naming rights of Twerton Park with suggestions such as “The Wreck” and “The Pigsty” put forward but not picked out of the hat. The winners were the Mayday Trust, which by coincidence was the organisation that the late Brian Lomax was head of, before starting the first ever supporters’ trust at Northampton Town in 1992, giving birth to the fan-ownership movement of which Bath became part.

Lomax, who died in 2015 would have been proud at the community ethos in place at Bath City and the ability to skirt the old and the new that the club does very well.

In Twerton Park, Bath City have one of the most complete traditional football grounds remaining in England, ticking all the boxes of any football fan that remembers how football was before the draconian changes after the Taylor Report.

You wonder why tourists throng the nondescript shopping mall stadia of the Premier League when you can have a traditional total football experience at Twerton with a glass of Duvel in the Royal Oak beforehand.

©Dave Harry/ Terrace Edition. Bath City FC.

It feels like the ground was there before the houses, a ridiculous notion given the weathering to the Bath stone homes, ice cream coloured with drips of sauce but nevertheless the landscape grows around Twerton Park like few in England.

Up on the hill behind the ground, kids sell lemonade and ask what time is kick-off despite knowing they will be there later anyway, which is as good a sign of home as anything.

The main stand is just the right shade of green to remind you of times when you’d be put outside the pub with your brothers, with a packet of crisps and a bottle of pop, while the ground’s entrance should be a UNESCO world heritage site, with its patina’d brickwork and ever dripping dank gents facilities and ironic sign reading “please leave this toilet as you would expect to find it”.

Meanwhile, the expansive Bristol End terrace gives space for 90 minute football baptisms, when the rain sets in.

Bath City play St Albans City and give them a 3-1 kicking but the Saints fans aren’t too despondent, supporting a team which once scored seven goals in an FA Cup tie with Dulwich Hamlet and still lost 8-7.

As the sun goes and the iron giant floodlights lean over, there’s a Polish football supporter of MKS Cracovia watching the dying minutes of the game from the vantage point in the corner behind the Bristol End.

In the Loach film Sweet Sixteen, Liam is offered an upscale apartment, which solves none of his problems and creates an uneasy feeling.

Bath City need to be careful with any redevelopment plans that change the character of Twerton Park.

With the trend for super stadia, sometimes it’s better to do nothing at all and sit and wait in the completeness.

©Dave Harry/ Terrace Edition. St Albans City fans at Bath City FC.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Bristol End, Bath City FC.

Tom is Terrace Edition Editor and can be found on Twitter: @tomreedwriting

Dave is on Twitter: @daveharry007

The mystery of Bath City's Mascot Man has been solved – thanks to readers @BathCity_FC http://t.co/OyaYfNGHWz pic.twitter.com/rT23DAzfCy
— Bath Live (@bathlive) July 4, 2015

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