Britain's less-visited historic towns with pubs, walks – and football (2024)

In 1975, the great architecture writer Ian Nairn made three films about Football Towns for the BBC.

Born in Bedford and brought up in Surrey, Nairn admired and envied working-class northerners’ sense of community and identity. Introducing the Bolton episode, while standing on the terraces, he points out that people elsewhere in Britain are familiar with the names of such places from playing the Football Pools.

“But do you know the towns?” he asks.

“What I’m interested in is the towns themselves. They’re mostly industrial places, where the real hard stuff of Britain is going on.

“They’re mostly of very great character, much greater than they’re given credit for. And they’re mostly unvisited, unless you go on business or come for the match.”

Almost fifty years later, football has changed. But many football towns are as underexplored as ever. Just as the Premier League hogs media attention and gobbles up all the money, so bigger cities are seen as the only really interesting urban centres.

But it’s not true. Some seemingly unglamorous towns (and cities) with teams in lower divisions – Wrexham, Walsall, Bolton, Milton Keynes – are substantial places. They have fascinating stadia and histories – footballing and otherwise. Some cities – Cambridge, Salford, Exeter – might be known for other attractions, but also have a secret sporting life that can open up unseen quarters.

The Championship is dominated by cities, but here places such as Stoke, Middlesborough and Millwall fall off the radar of most tourists – relegated to bypass-status by more bucolic or better-marketed places.

The lucky people who get paid to travel around the UK are MPs, drivers, football teams and travelling salespersons. Why not use the 2024–2025 season to plan your trips – with the odd match thrown in for fun?

Crewe

The ultimate bypassed town, Crewe has long been known as the northern capital of rail – though it can just about be claimed by the Midlands, too. As well as the busy junction, it was a train-manufacturing powerhouse, and its history is on show at the superb Crewe Heritage Centre.

Crewe Alexandra, which, like many football teams, emerged from a cricket club, is named after Princess Alexandra. The club’s nickname is “The Railwaymen”: founder members were employees at Crewe locomotive works.

The first pitch was in the Alexandra Recreation Ground, which opened in 1877, wedged in between the cattle market and railway lines. Today’s ground, Gresty Road, also known as the Mornflake Stadium, is handy for the station.

Crewe has been hit hard by the axing of HS2, but there are green shoots – including the market hall, which reopened in 2021 as a food court and music venue after a £3 million redevelopment.

See the railway cottages on Betley Street and Dorfold Street, Edwardian Lyceum Theatre and Gothic Revival Christ Church Tower – the remnant of a demolished church built in 1845 by the Grand Junction Railway Company.

Stay at Crewe Hall Hotel & Spa, two miles outside town. Doubles start from £106 per night.

Wrexham

Thanks to the promotional antics of American actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, and the Disney+ series Welcome to Wrexham, the de facto capital of North Wales is firmly on international sports and sightseeing radars. 

Wrexham AFC is the oldest football club in Wales and one of the oldest in the world. The Racecourse Ground, next to Wrexham General railway station, only has a capacity of around 12,600 – but it looks imposing and used to host international matches.

Around town there’s football-related street art (Wrexham’s star striker Paul Mullin adorns the wall of The Fat Boar; Wrexham AFC manager Phil Parkinson is on The Turf, beside the stadium) and a Ryan Rodney Reynolds Memorial Park is soon to be unveiled.

But Wrexham – made a city in 2022 – is much more than football and film actors. Tŷ Pawb is a market-cum-gallery space. Marubbi’s Café and Temperance Bar, which opened in 1896, still serves warm Vimto.

The General Market (formerly the Butter Market, for dairy produce), built in 1879 in the famous Ruabon brick of this area, and the old Butchers’ Market are undergoing renovation, as is the high street.

Stay at The Lemon Tree, which has doubles from £80 per night.

Barrow-in-Furness

Windermere has its lake, Grasmere its poet, Kendal its mint cake. Barrow has Emlyn Hughes, immortalised in a statue outside Emlyn Hughes House and opposite The Duke of Edinburgh Hotel – where DH Lawrence and Charlie Chaplin stayed.

Holker Street, which has also been used for speedway, is an old-school stadium, the sort of place where you can hear people talking on the other side of the pitch as well as the manager’s instructions to players. It has only a slightly larger capacity than Craven Park, the rugby league venue; this Lancashire steel-and-iron town used to be a force in the northern code.

While streams of tourists flood the Lakes, Barrow is overlooked, but it has a wonderful crumbling abbey, expanses of sandy beaches on Walney Island, grey seals and a castle ruin. There is also a great pub, on Piel island, and the excellent Dock Museum – which explains the chain of events that links the discovery of ores to shipbuilding: Barrow makes nuclear-powered and armed subs.

To the south of Barrow is Black Combe, a fair-sized fell on which the climb begins almost at sea-level. Ride the scenic Cumbrian Coast line to see Whitehaven and Workington.

Stay at Holiday Inn Express, which has doubles from £81 per night.

West Bromwich

Following the 2022 Commonwealth Games, Birmingham was formally welcomed into the elite stable of big-hitting metropolises. The Black Country, which occupies the other half of the West Midlands, is for many people little more than jammed motorways and railway stations.

West Bromwich is easy to reach on a train and is a great place to take in FA founder member West Bromwich Albion’s stadium – The Hawthorns, here since 1900 – do some exploratory canal walking that combines flyovers with rus in urbe towpath verges, and have a superb meal and drink at The Vine, a Desi pub of 45 years standing – just a hundred yards from the M5. Other great football towns – Walsall, Coventry and Wolverhampton – are all just a short train ride away.

Stay The Mount in Wolverhampton, with doubles available from £105 per night.

Exeter City

Exeter is a rugby union town, a cathedral town, a horseracing town, a university town, and the gateway to the south-west – a preferred destination of middle-class tourists. A walk to Exeter City’s ground, St James Park, to the northeast of the centre, is like turning your back on the obvious and having a look around the residential edges.

The land here was originally used by local nobles for fattening pigs. City was founded in 1901 as St Sidwell’s United and played against Brazil during a 1914 tour of South America – the match was Brazil’s first ever outing as a national team – but it has never progressed above the third-tier.

Would Exeter have qualified as one of Nairn’s football towns? Probably not, but, while you’re in the area, why not go a few levels further down the pecking order? A short train ride away is Newton Abbot, home to Buckland Athletic FC, which plays in the Toolstation League. A big gate here is 1,781, and that many came for a match against Torquay United. Ollie Watkins, who made such an impact at this year’s Euros, played for Buckland and Exeter.

Stay at City Gate, where there are doubles available from £84 per night.