Tell us about important football places - Scottish Football Heritage Project

Overview

We are excited to launch our Scottish Football Heritage Project and we need your help. Our aim is to enhance our records of places that are important within the history and development of football. We also want to ensure that our protected historic places (such as listed buildings and scheduled monuments) include the most important football heritage sites.

We'd like your help

To help inform our knowledge and awareness of important football places, we are asking you to give us views and information on which places we should investigate. 

We are interested in a huge variety of football places... an old stand at a football stadium, a pub that has been closely linked to a club for generations, a recreation park where an historic team once played or maybe even the building where your team was formed!

What do we have

We have an incredible variety of places recorded on Trove (our National Record of the Historic Environment) and some of these places are also protected historic places. 

Our Trove records provide a comprehensive, online accessible list of places that are part of our built environment. We have hundreds of football heritage places on Trove but we know there are many more places to add to the record. We can also improve our exisiting Trove records by adding additional details. 

The terraced end of Ayr Utd’s Somerset Park, recorded for the NRHE during the day and then again whilst packed with fans during a match (DP00314605 and DP314533, crown copyright HES).

We only have a handful of listed buildings and scheduled monuments that directly relate to football places and we know there are probably more that could be designated as protected historic places.

The A-listed main stand at Ibrox Stadium, designed by the prolific stadium designer Archibald Leitch, is one of Scotland’s few protected football heritage sites (SC2534812, crown copyright HES).

Recent case studies

We recently worked on a project investigating football heritage related places in the southside of Glasgow. Our investigation and survey of these places resulted in new and enhanced NRHE and listed building records, such as the Rose Reilly pub and the place where Scotland’s oldest football club, Queen’s Park FC, were formed. We also successfully designated several places as scheduled monuments and listed buildings, including Cathkin Park – the site of the second incarnation of Hampden Park and later, the home of Third Lanark FC.

The old terraces at Cathkin Park, now part of a scheduled monument, are recognised as one of the most significant football heritage sites in the country (DP 639837).

The Rose Reilly pub (formerly the Hampden Bar), renamed in 2023 to honour one of Scotland’s most famous and pioneering female footballers (DP639836, crown copyright HES).

Why your views matter

We’d love to hear your thoughts about important football heritage places. We will consider all of the suggestions we receive, and our aim is to look into as many places as possible to significantly improve our records and assess some for possible designation. (Find out more about designations in the Advice and Support section of the Historic Environment Scotland website, and read our Designation Policy and Selection Guidance (2019).

You can give us your views by completing the survey below. The information you provide will help us understand which places are important in Scottish football and inform which places our project should investigate. 

This questionnaire usually takes 5 minutes to complete.