Grounds like the Rec are becoming fewer in number and, with the question of a move inching closer, that number may be one fewer over the next couple of years or so. Football has been played at the Spireites' current ground since 1871, but the old place has changed beyond all recognition in that time.

Prior to using the Recreation Ground the earliest Chesterfield Football Club - no more than an arm of the cricket club - played at the Recreation Ground. Bear with me - this Rec was a hundred yards or so closer to town than the current place: Tennyson Avenue runs up the middle of what was the field that was once our home. When the cricket club fell out with the owner of the Rec the club moved a bit further along Saltergate to what was immediately known as the New Recreation Ground. The word "new" dropped out of use a couple of years later.

The stand in 1905, from the Cross St / Compton St corner

Football shared with cricket until the mid-1890s.Looking around, it is difficult to imagine a cricket field fitting in the perimeter, but take away the stands, terraces, St Margaret's Drive and Cross Street in your mind's eye and the room becomes available.The away fans' end was once known as the Cricket Pitch End, but this pitch would not have had a 'square', as such, since it was customary in those days for the visiting team to decide where the wicket would be pitched, anywhere on the field.This end has also been known as the Brickyard End, since there was a brick yard off Hawkesley Avenue, and Brickyard Walk, which runs from Marsden Street to Tennyson Avenue, continued along behind the ground before being widened into Cross Street.

An agricultural fair on the multi-purpose stadium, around 1912. Note the tiny cover on the Pop Side.

A 1915 map of the area shows the ground largely unchanged, apart from extensions to the stand; intriguingly, though, there is a mission church in the bottom left-hand corner, clearly inside the ground's perimeter, and perhaps more or less where the Saltergate/West Street floodlight now stands. The Rec is indeed consecrated ground!

A 1918 map shows the church in the corner, within the perimeter of the stadium!

The area underwent significant change in 1921, when the corporation extended Cross Street from Cobden Road to Tennyson Avenue.The plan was to extend it further into the Holywell Cross area to take pressure off Newbold Road and Saltergate, but that is unlikely ever to materialise. The club made a gift of the necessary land to the council in exchange for the building of the wall at the back of the Cross Street end. This wall is the oldest surviving feature of the ground today. To accommodate Cross Street the pitch was shifted around twenty feet closer to Saltergate, and levelled by as much as four feet along its length. There used to be a noticeable hill in the Compton Street/Cross Street corner of the ground: much of this was dug out to fulfil a condition of entry to the Football League in 1899, but an appreciable slope remained until the 1921 alterations.

A wooden stand sat where the current one is.This was put up around 1893 and originally held about 400.It was steadily doubled in size to hold 1600, eventually, and was roofed over when we joined the Football League in 1899.This stand lasted until 1936, when it was replaced by the present edifice.It didn't quite run the length of the pitch; its northern end was where the players' tunnel is today, and a ramshackle hut between that and the Cross Street end served as changing rooms.Each extension took it closer to Saltergate until, by the time of its demolition, there was a tidy symmetry to the thing.Directors' rooms and offices occupied land between the stand and Saltergate.To get into it, you paid ground admission at Saltergate and then paid to transfer to the enclosure or the stand.For a number of years, women were admitted free of charge, since it was felt that their presence had a calming effect on their men folkThe lack of a 'wet' bar would have been of greater effect, though: the club banned the sale of ale at the ground after the First World War following continued scenes of drunkenness and vile behaviour, and it was some years before such facilities were reinstated.

Turning our gaze away from the stand, little appears to have changed in eighty years.A fan from the early 1920s would certainly recognise the Cross Street end and "Pop" side as the are now, just - Apart from the laying of concrete terracing and the replacement of wooden crush barriers with metal ones around 1950, the only change of note to the away end had been the removal of the half-time scoreboard.Similarly, although the Pop Side roof has been replaced once since its installation in 1921, you'd hardly know, and the television gantry was the only new feature (beyond fences and safety steps) to be added there for fifty years until seats were added a couple of seasons ago.

1950s Saltergate was a textbook Leitch stadium

If you look into the Pop Side roof from underneath you get a pretty clear indication of the staged nature of its construction.It was built in three sections; roofs in the middle and at the Cross Street end of it were built during the summer of 1921 and the Saltergate end of the thing was added a little later.The centre section was replaced completely when the tv gantry was added.

The Kop was roofed while the club was at its lowest ebb for some time, in 1960.There is a plaque above the centre entrance to the Kop, at the top of the steps, which reveals some details about this - see if you can find it.There are one or two similar inscriptions about the old place, usually built into toilet walls, that tell of the Supporters' Club's efforts in paying for these developments.It is to be hoped that such items will not end up in a skip when the Recreation Ground is demolished, but might perhaps be built into a corner of the new place, as a small memorial to all those who have tried to improve their club over the years.

The major changes over the last fifteen years have all come about as a result of disasters at other stadia and are not too obvious - rewiring and the installation of fire doors tend not to capture the imagination.The most obvious change on Saltergate's face (from my mother-in-law's place in Brimington, anyway) is the floodlights.

The club resisted the installation of lights for too long, and were the last League side to use them at home.Ironically, we might have been the joint-first club to play a League game under lights, but the board turned down Rochdale's suggestion that we play under the Spotland lights around 1955.Our first set came second-hand from Bramall Lane and lay rusting behind the Kop (on the area that old players who trained there refer to as "Scar Park") before the money and will was found to get them up.As each one was put up, they began to twist, and the first one was erected and dismantled more than once.In the end three were erected before the whole thing was written off as a bad job, and a new lot were bought.Some ten years or so after fans first began to press for their installation, the club played its first League game under the Saltergate lights on October 23rd., 1967.

A 1990s aerial shot shows the slight kink in the main stand - another classic Leitch device.

Here is an irony. Many critics of modern stadium design condemn the sameness of new grounds, of their resemblance to DIY superstores or industrial units. They are derided for their lack of "character." Well, by the mid-fifties, The Recreation Ground was a textbook, modernLeitch ground, consisting of three sides of concrete terracing and a single main stand. The terracing used patented Leitch crush barriers, identical to those at every other Leitch ground, and the stand design was noticeably similar to other modern Leitch ones at Derby County and Blackburn Rovers, with its brick front and small pitch-side windows. In short, the ground looked neat, modern and similar to a lot of others. It was the Bescot Stadium of its day. Subsequent modifications, the Kop roof, the television gantry and different colours of paint - gave the ground its "character," and the effects of weathering gave it an appeal that can be described as "homely."

Apart from an empty bank account, a string of understandably stroppy creditors and the seething hatred of almost everyone in football, Darren Brown also bequeathed us a string of broken promises to the Football Licensing authorities regarding ground development. Faced with the real prospect of having three sides of the ground closed, CFSS had to do something about the place and did a fine job, re-terracing the standing areas and putting seats onto the Pop Side in recent times. As welcome as the work was, though, it keeps the club only barely viable.

The Kop is re-terraced - the old stuff is just visible below the shuttering.

Much has been written elsewhere about a new stadium for Chesterfield FC. After the idea to build on the Queens Park Annexe was floated (and dismissed on cost grounds) in 1919, sites have been discussed from Junction 29 in the east to Goldwell Hill in the west, and Wingerworth in the south to Sheepbridge in the north. We have now settled on a site at the former Dema Glass works on Sheffield Road. Most of those folk who now favour a move came to such a decision with a heavy heart, but the years of studied neglect that the place suffered before CFSS did something about it in 2001 have left too much to do - not so much with the bricks and mortar as with the perception that locals hold of the place. To my mind we have to attract new people to watch Chesterfield, and we will not do that without attractive, modern facilities to watch the team in. Furthermore, we need a stadium that can make money from non-football activity. Its sad, but most of those fans of other clubs who have gone down a similar road would not go back. We move away, or we pass away.