Love Street (stadium)

St Mirren Park, more commonly known as Love Street, was a football stadium located on Love Street in Paisley, Scotland. At one time the stadium was capable of accommodating almost 50,000 spectators, however in its final years it had an all-seated capacity of 10,800. Until its closure in 2009, it was the home ground of St Mirren F.C.

The football grounds on Love Street were registered as Fullerton Park for St Mirren's first season there as they were originally rented from a Mr Fullerton. The ground's record attendance was 47,438 for a match against Celtic in 1949. St Mirren completed construction of their new St Mirren Park in December 2008. St Mirren played their last game at Love Street, against Motherwell, on 3 January 2009.

Early years at Love Street

When St Mirren began to play on Love Street in the mid-1890s football clubs were still very much in their infancy and moved from ground to ground renting from local landowners. The best deal available was commonly a ten-year lease and by the time St Mirren arrived at Love Street, the club was only 17 years old and playing on its fifth rented ground. They had previously played on four sites in the north of Paisley; Shortroods Estate (1877 to 1878), Abingdon Park (1878 to 1879), Thistle Park, Greenhill Road (1879 to 1882), and Westmarch Estate, Greenhill Road (1882 to 1894). Paisley clubs Abercorn, who played at Underwood Park, and St Mirren joined the Scottish Football League when it started in 1890–91.

Following twelve years playing at Westmarch, St Mirren moved in 1894 in response to a 100% rent increase by the landlord who appeared to have lost interest in hosting football on his land. The club found a former brickworks at the foot of Love Street which could be rented for an initial ten years on reasonable terms. The land at Westmarch had been laid out with two pitches, a grandstand and pavilion; the Love Street site was substantially smaller, barely wide enough to lay a football pitch with some spare ground behind the goals; it was poorly drained and without grass. However, it would give St Mirren the significant advantage of being nearer to Paisley town centre than any of the other football clubs in the town. Furthermore, the site was already well known to the townsfolk as an entertainment venue, as it was where travelling circuses set up their Big Top.

The original Love Street site housed the re-built club pavilion behind the Love Street end goal, and a new grandstand, squeezed along the full length of the pitch with five rows of seats and a total capacity of 1,000. St Mirren played their first home game at Love Street, a 3–0 defeat to Celtic, on 8 September 1894.

Shortly after the original ten-year lease ran out, the club was almost forced to move away from Love Street, much as it had already been from Westmarch. With the club approaching Mr Fullerton with an offer to buy the site, the landowner tried to take advantage of the situation by setting a lofty price, together with an ultimatum to either buy or face a hefty increase in rent. The club hastily looked for alternatives, and began negotiations with the owners of the Shortroods Estate where St Mirren had played for its first season. However, with the prospect of losing out altogether, Mr Fullerton backed down, reducing his asking price to £3,900 and thus Saints purchased and stayed at Love Street.

Over the course of the next fifteen years the club's aim was to expand the site by buying the land that bordered on two sides – towards the town and round onto Greenock Road. However, it was not until 1920 that the land was finally secured and St Mirren owned pretty much the site that it occupied through to its closure.

Development of Love Street

With a large site now owned, and the football pitch about to be moved 40 yards towards the town, the club had plans in 1921 for a 60,000 capacity ground with a large oval sweep of earth embankments on three sides, with the fourth side taken up by a 4,500 seater grandstand set up above a 3,000 capacity terraced enclosure, with a 440-yard running track round the pitch. However, before building began, the Great Depression in the United Kingdom tightened its grip and costs more than doubled in the space of six months.

The part of the project to suffer most was the grandstand as the final price of the stadium rose from an estimate of £17,500, for the full plans, to around £30,000 for the scaled-down version that was completed six months later. The grandstand was reduced in size by almost two-thirds with the steel framework clad in corrugated sheeting to further reduce costs. The St Mirren Directors' intention was to eventually complete the original plans for a full-length grandstand on Love Street in stages as funds permitted, however this did not materialise.

After 1921 there were no major changes to the grounds until the late 1950s when the North Bank was covered and floodlights installed. Twenty years later new floodlight pylons were installed and plans appeared for redeveloping St Mirren Park as an all-seater stadium. There was also talk of incorporating airport car-parking, or a hotel, or commercial office space.

Love Street became a designated ground under the Safety of Sports Grounds Act in 1977, which prompted the local government to demand alterations. In the summer of 1979, the Love Street End terracing was knocked down and rebuilt ten yards from the goal. There was more talk of covering the new family enclosure at Cairter's Corner and installing a stadium clock and even one suggestion to re-locate in Renfrew District (SFA) preferring to redevelop Hampden Park, St Mirren remained at Love Street and seats were installed on the North Bank terrace in 1991. Four years later, after the owner of a large building company had joined the club's board of directors, the 3,015 seat Caledonia Stand was built in a deal that saw some of the club's land sold for development as housing. There were also plans to have a similar stand built at the Love Street End but the bottom fell out of the construction industry and there was the near closure of St Mirren in 1998.

St Mirren won the 1999–2000 Scottish First Division and were promoted to the Scottish Premier League (SPL) as First Division champions. In order to meet SPL regulations in their first season in the top flight, the club had to carry out further work on the stadium, installing seating on the Love Street terrace.

The stands

At the time of the stadium closing, the 1921 main stand remained situated on the southern (town) side of the stadium. The largest stand was the West Stand (Caledonia Street), which housed away fans. The North Bank stand was sponsored by former shirt-sponsors LDV and was where the most vocal home fans usually sat. The most recently built stand, the East Stand, or Reid Kerr College Stand, was on the Love Street side of the stadium and became used as the home support's Family Stand .

Floodlights

In the 1950s the club had a unique problem when it came to installing floodlights at Love Street. The ground was on the direct approach path for aircraft to the local airport which, at that time, was a mere three miles east, in Renfrew. This meant that as well as involving Paisley Town Council, Saints' plans also had to satisfy three Government departments - the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Air Ministry and The Admiralty.

Initially there were roof-line lights set all the way along the newly built North Bank cover and the grandstand opposite. But, because the stand was considerably shorter than full-length there also had to be two pylons built to light the corners of the pitch on the stand side. And these could not be very tall because of the flight-path. They ended up therefore as two, strangely squat-looking, 40-foot pylons that weren't even as tall as the stand roof and had three rows of lights topped by a reflector shield.

These pylons had originally been used at either end of the covered terracing at Ibrox Stadium and came to Love Street as part of the transfer negotiations that took central defender Willie Telfer to Rangers.

Nonetheless, there still came complaints from pilots that the pylon to the right of the stand was confusing their approach and a black-out order was imposed whilst aviation charts had this new landmark added. It then took a further eight months for the Air Ministry to run tests and finally pass the system fit for use. The first match under the floodlights was on 13 February 1959 against Peebles Rovers in the Scottish Cup

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