Saturday 29th August 2026 ko 14:00

West Lancashire League Division Two

STOREYS OF LANCASTER 7 (Hollywood 11 19 47 Creech 40 64 88 Fenton 43)

HAWCOAT PARK 0

Att 253

Entry £5

Programme £2

We headed into Lancaster itself for our next game, and another with difficult parking, in suburbab streets. It wasn’t difficult to find a suitable space and half the fun of doing so was walking down York Road to the ground. A cat glowered at me, wondering why I and so many other strangers were invading his territory!

Formed in 1887 Storeys were the works team of Storey Bros of Lancaster, a firm that made snooker table baize, oil cloth and later plastic sheeting. That was enough to make the Storey Brothers close to Lancaster royalty, with one brother William being a diector of White Star, the firm that famously produced the cruise liner, Titanic. The family seat Bailrigg House is now part of the fabric of Lancaster University.

Storeys FC were once mainstays of the North Lancashire League, and were the first owners and occupiers of The Giant Axe, now home to Lancaster City. Wht did they sell up? They thought they’d never need a ground that big! After leaving they led a slightly nomadic life before settling at York Road in the 1950’s. Now it is the lot of the groundhopper to critique what they can see, I know one hopper who sketches each ground in a notebook. If you are not careful you can not see what is behind the bricks and mortar, and York Road is a classic example of this.

You could see the place as a railed-off pitch with a clubhouse, and that would be doing Storeys a massive disservice. See it as every single thing you see has been built by the hard graft of volunteers and you see just what an achievement the place is. And there were good things happening under the gazebos despite the rain..

On the pitch Storeys didn’t need to hit top gear to despatch a Hawcoat Park side that resigned from the league soon afterwards and quickly found a home in the (Barrow-in-) Furness League. Now that’s a league I’d like to get my teeth into!