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Advice to editors: this article is about Plough Lane. Please do not add further material about Wimbledon FC's move to Milton Keynes as this is already well covered in other articles.
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Plough Lane was a football stadium in Wimbledon, south west London, England. For nearly eighty years it was the home ground of Wimbledon Football Club.
Plough Lane was Wimbledon F.C.'s ground from September 1912 until May 1991, when the club moved their first team home matches to Selhurst Park as part of a groundshare agreement with Crystal Palace. Both clubs' reserve teams then used Plough Lane as their home ground until 1998, when the site was sold to Safeway, who intended to redevelop the site as a supermarket. Whilst site redevelopment plans were negotiated, the stadium remained derelict for several years until it was finally demolished in 2002. When permission for a supermarket was ultimately refused by the local authority, Safeway sold the site and it was eventually developed as a private housing development known as Reynolds Gate, named after former Wimbledon F.C. striker Eddie Reynolds, which was completed in 2008.
Plans to build a new stadium for AFC Wimbledon on the nearby site of the Wimbledon Greyhound track, situated approximately 200 yards (183 metres) from the original Plough Lane stadium, were approved by Merton Council in December 2015. Construction on the 'New Plough Lane' began in 2018, and it opened on 3 November 2020.
History
As Wimbledon F.C.'s home ground
The leasehold on the disused marshland at the corner of Plough Lane and Haydons Road was purchased by Wimbledon Football Club in 1912. The pitch was consequently fenced in and the playing surface improved, while a dressing room was built. A stand holding 500 spectators was erected, Improvements continued to be made to the ground during the First World War, and Plough Lane soon became the pride of the club — in 1918, Vice-president A. Gill Knight boasted that the club had "the finest ground in the southern district". The South Stand was added in 1923, purchased from Clapton Orient. The terrace in front of the North Stand was improved during 1932–33, and by the start of the Second World War the ground's capacity stood at 30,000. The ground was even used as the site of an amateur international match, when England took on Wales on 19 January 1935.
The South Stand was restored to its former glory in 1950, and 1950–51 saw the capacity back around the 25,000 mark. Glass panels were fitted at each end of both stands two years later, at the cost of £90, 8s — a sum equivalent to £ in 2009. Due to inflation, the price paid by Black for the stadium would have been equal to £ in 2009 — this became significant as one of the conditions of the sale of the ground was the insertion of a pre-emption clause stating that if the site was ever to be used for any purpose other than sport, the council would have the right to buy the ground back for the same price it had been paid, regardless of inflation.
The first match under the new floodlights took place on 3 October 1960, in a London Charity Cup match against Arsenal. Arsenal beat Wimbledon 4–1. Despite election to the Football League in 1977 and subsequent success, the club was still plagued by financial trouble.
Following the publication of the Taylor Report in 1990, which introduced new safety measures for football stadia including the regulation that the stadia of teams at the highest level be made all-seater by August 1994, the board of the club decided that Plough Lane could not be economically redeveloped to meet the new standards. The work required to modernise Plough Lane would have been difficult and expensive, but not impossible as the board claimed. Over the next decade, numerous options for a new stadium to be built in either the London Borough of Merton or elsewhere were explored, including a controversial plan to relocate to Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, which emerged in 1995.
Finally, Wimbledon relocated to Milton Keynes some 70 miles away in 2003, in a controversial move which had been approved the previous year and sparked the creation of AFC Wimbledon by the majority of the club's fans. The original Wimbledon club was renamed Milton Keynes Dons in 2004. The new Wimbledon club started life in the Combined Counties League and reached the Football League in 2011.
After Wimbledon F.C.
Even after the departure of the Wimbledon first team, Plough Lane continued to be used by both Wimbledon and Crystal Palace as the home ground for their reserve teams' home matches. This was the case until 1998, when Sam Hammam sold the ground to supermarket chain Safeway. Safeway sought to build a supermarket on the site for four years but, after local residents' opposition and local authority objections to their plans, gave up in 2002. They demolished the stadium during the summer of that year and subsequently sold the vacant site to David Wilson Homes in November 2002. Planning permission was granted to the developer in October 2005 to build 570 flats, and the development was completed in 2008. Following lobbying by Wimbledon supporters, the development agreed to adopt a Wimbledon Football Club theme, with the entire site named "Reynolds Gate" after former player Eddie Reynolds. The six individual blocks that comprise the development were also named after former players, managers and a chairman: Bassett House, Batsford House, Cork House, Lawrie House, Reed House and Stannard House.