Got to be Gigg: Bury FC return to Gigg Lane

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Ian Parker

Bury FC fans turned out, last week, like they always do, to rally round their home ground Gigg Lane, to maintain and preserve and to keep it ticking over.

This is no Ferrari of a stadium, more a vintage Ford Cortina, as when you get the engine going nicely, something is waiting to blow.

It comes with heritage.

They’d assembled in 2019 to buff, to clean and to do all the things that powerless people do to feel some semblance of control when something they love seems to be slipping away.

The story is well told, Bury FC, formed when the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury was Prime Minister, were expelled from the English Football League in August 2019 after a catalogue of financial failures.

Though never liquidated, the club, that started in 1885, had no league to play in, was comatosed and unlikely to ever come out of it.

Bury fans cried as Saturday became a void rather than an oasis from the working week, they fell out among themselves and some started a phoenix club and all the normal things that happen when the people to blame are just untouchable ghosts in boardrooms and in cars spirited from stadia containing errant private owners.

There was a time when fissures in the Bury fanbase seemed insurmountable and when a ballot to merge the Bury Football Club Supporters’ Society (BFCSS) and Bury AFC’S Shakers’ Community Society, to get the show back on the road, came back as a no in October 2022, it felt like the fans could be their own worse enemies.

Yet, despite onlookers’ temptation to conclude that football in Bury was beyond hope, sometimes, doing right by each other is a more powerful force than the trivialities of individual disagreements.

A second vote in May 2023 saw the two supporters’ groups vote to amalgamate, uniting the playing outfit assembled brilliantly by Bury AFC with the bricks, mortar and turf of Gigg Lane itself.

The ground had been maintained loyally by a team of volunteers at the BFCSS and with financial help from a group of benefactors.

To go from a club kicked out of the league and with more pigeons than players on your home pitch to organising a first ‘proper’ match back at Gigg Lane as Bury FC in the space of four years, is a rollercoaster ride that Universal Studios would consider unworkable.

Yet, that’s what’s been achieved, with Bury FC lined up to play Bradford City at home on July 8, followed by Preston North End the day after in a double-header that will test the strongest powers of preparedness.

Bradford have sold over a thousand tickets for the pre-season friendly already, with Bantams fans aware of the significance of the match and more than happy to bring Bury back into Northern eco-system.

PNE are managed by ex-Bury legend Ryan Lowe, so his helping hand was a given, from a man who has never been backwards in coming forwards in aiding the team that gave him so much.

That just leaves the army of volunteers, which puts Challenge Anneka to shame, to bring Gigg Lane up to scratch for its return to the fray in just over two week’s time.

Former Bury AFC director Darren Bernstein speaks highly of the community spirit that putting together a match draws out.

“There’s so many people doing so much stuff, literally I’ll drop into the ground and there’s a whole load of faces, I’ve seen them at games but I don’t know their names and they are cleaning that many seats. There’s people doing manual stuff that actually needs doing and there’s plenty of people doing the more business strategy stuff, so selling sponsorships, getting suppliers in, there’s dozens and dozens of people, who in their own way are doing what they can and every little bit is as valuable as the next”.

“Taking it from Bury AFC, the success of it was that no one person was more important than another, if you have this amount of time to volunteer and you gave expertise in a certain area, we need that. Hopefully what AFC has been able to bring is that enthusiasm and expertise to the table and hopefully with the unification, it just expands that pool of people”.

Bury have been keen to get back into the community it had to shrink back from after the league expulsion and are giving away free season-tickets to nearby junior football teams, to rebuild those bridges of locality that make lower league clubs so significant.

Gigg Lane itself will be packed for the Bradford match and although capacity is likely to be limited with only a couple of stands open, the preparation for instant promotion from the North West Counties Football League Premier Division begins in earnest.

There’s no doubt that Bury will be hungry for a return to the Football League from step nine of the football pyramid, which will bring challenges of its own, especially with regards the fan-ownership structure and the club’s relationship to outside investors.

Those factors will come further down the line but for now, the people of Bury are just happy they have a ground to congregate at and a match to look forward to,

Just so long as there are enough pies to go round, the seats will be well polished.