Ground
Tilbury moved to Chadfields, a former greyhound racing venue, after World War II. Previously they had played next door at a venue known as the Orient Field, which was leased from a director of Leyton Orient, but moved out after he ruled that they could only continue using it if they became Orient's "feeder club", which they were unwilling to do. The club purchased the ground in 1949 with money raised from the sale of a player to Southend United.
Floodlights were erected in 1966, followed in 1970 by an unusual concrete stand in which spectators are located above the ground-floor dressing rooms and must look out on the action through a row of large windows. A second brick-built stand with two rows of wooden seats was added in the 1990s. The ground is also notable for a huge expanse of netting behind one goal, designed to catch balls which might otherwise fly out the ground, but placed in such a way that spectators have to look through it.
The largest attendance recorded at the ground was 5,500 for an FA Cup first round match against Gorleston in 1949, although in the modern era crowds are much more modest.
Read more about this topic: Tilbury F.C.
Famous quotes containing the word ground:
“Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Keep out of Chancery.... It’s being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)