Sports and Recreation
The town has a non-league football team, Winsford United that suffered numerous relegations and now plays in the North West Counties Football League Division 2. Support for the team has dwindled over the years, falling from a pre-war peak of over 10,000 to just 100. The Blues, (after the colour of their shirts) play at Barton Stadium. Neville Southall once played for the club.
Winsford ASC is a swimming club which has achieved Swim21 club status and won the North West Division 1 speedo league. It has now been promoted to the premier league.
Vale Royal Athletic Club is based mainly in Northwich and Winsford, and has several international athletes training with them. This club was created in its present form by the merger, in 1994, of the Mid Cheshire Athletic Club and Winsford Athletic Club.
The youth football teams are Winsford Junior Blues, Winsford Over 3 and Winsford diamonds.
Winsford Cricket Club play in the Meller Braggins Cheshire Cricket League, which forms part of the Cheshire pyramid. Winsford have had a cricket team since 1888 when the team was founded by ICI workers and played at the Dingle, next to the Palace Picture House (now Palace Bingo). In 1991 Winsford moved to Knights Grange to allow the Council to build the new council offices (Wyvern House).
Allotment gardens at Moss Bank, Over, date from 1924, when William Stubbs of 'Leahlands', Swanlow Lane, sold a 4-acre (16,000 m2) field behind High Street to Winsford Urban District Council, ‘for the purpose of the Allotments Act’. The field, named on the 1846 Over Parish Tithe Map as 'Well Field', had been farmed since at least the seventeenth century, and its conversion to allotments secured its use for future generations. The site shrank in the 1960s and 1970s with the building of housing and an electricity sub-station along Moss Bank, but the acquisition in 1970 of land adjacent to Over Recreation Ground brought it to its present size.
In the late 1980s, a record-breaking pumpkin was grown on the allotments. Weighing in at 579 lb (263 kg), it held the national record for a time.
The allotments (about 50 plots and 5 raised beds) are owned and managed by Winsford Town Council. The plot-holders have their own organisation, Over Allotments and Leisure Gardeners’ Association. Lottery funding has enabled a programme of on-going improvements since 2002, the most recent grant being in 2007 from the Awards for All scheme for £6,940.
Winsford is also well known for its crown green bowlers, with many of the top players in the country hailing from Winsford over the years, many of whom played or play for Wharton Cons BC.
Winsford Flash Sailing Club is situated on Bottom Flash, the largest of the town's three flashes. The club was founded (originally as Northwich Sailing Club) in 1931 and moved to Winsford in 1934.
The Brighton Belle pub was known as the Railway Inn until 1972, when a Pullman carriage from the Brighton Belle train was added to function as a restaurant. In the next 26 years the carriage became a local landmark until it was removed in 1998 because the cost of refurbishment in situ was prohibitive.
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Famous quotes containing the words sports and/or recreation:
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