What does the Hampden Park legacy mean to you?
The Hampden Collection announces a new call for poetry called ‘The Last Stanza’ to spotlight that the 1st Hampden Park site has an uncertain future, and without intervention, we may lose it forever. Hampden Bowling Club, which has protected the site for the last 120 years, will close on 28th February 2026, and there is real concern that this incredible football heritage site could be lost to history. We are calling on all the volunteers, poets, artists, writers, researchers and friends of The Hampden Collection to make as much noise as possible to agitate and educate on what a significant site this is for Scotland’s cultural history, and what a profound loss it would be if we don’t preserve its history.
Our mission is to promote, protect and preserve the 3 Hampden Parks and all who played on them. There are three poetry collections that sit within The Hampden Collection, and is led by our Gaffer, Julie McNeill. ‘Braw Words‘ captures children’s poetic voices celebrating football and the ‘Scottish Women’s National Team Poets Society (SWNT)’ and the ‘Men’s National Team Collection’ capture the story of the national team through their history and current mission to qualify for major tournaments.
Our Hampden Collection Makars, Gaby Barnby, Donna Matthew, and Hugh McMillan, are encouraging submissions of three-stanza poems to celebrate the Hampden Park legacy. In the first instance, the poems we receive will be published on the Hampden Collection website and across all social media platforms to assist in the campaign to preserve the site. The ambition is to curate an event in February 2026 at Hampden Bowling Club, where they can be performed, with the possibility of publishing the submitted poems in a collection at a later date.
This is ’The Last Stanza’ for the 1st Hampden Site, and our mission is to create a crucible of poetry power and wake up our nation to the importance of the 1st Hampden Park. We have one last chance to save it.
Good luck with your poem. Express yourself! Submit your poem into your chosen collection and get involved with the Last Stanza event. Let’s keep football history alive.
To submit your poem, please chose your collection to submit into –
Men’s Team Collection – Hugh Mcmillan (aka our Hampden Collection Curator) will select the best ones to be posted –
SWNT Poets’ Society – Donna Matthew (our SWNT Poet) will select for the Women’s Team Collection
Braw Words – Gaby Barnby (our Bairns Bard) will select for our Young People’s Collection –
To give you a taster for what is required and the structure of these poems, our Makars have created one poem each to inspire you all to pick up your pen and submit a poem for the Collection – this is a hat-trick of poetry magic.
Hat Trick
1st time is never a given
Never a given it’ll happen
Never a given you’ll get the shirt
Never a given you’ll make the shot
Never a given it’ll happen
– then it does
2nd time is a chance to learn
Learn that winning means losing
Learn that support means pressure
Learn that nothing’s done alone
Learn to stick in
– there’ll be another chance
3rd time is getting the big picture
The big picture that’s local and global
The big picture that’s girls and boys
The big picture that includes the struggling, not just the strong
The big picture that’s yours and mine
– football hearts beating as one
by Gabrielle Barnby, Makar of the Braw Words Collection
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Ghosts on The Pitch
It’s one minute to midnight,
ghosts on the pitch
bobbing and weaving
our history
willing us to see them.
We leave childhood on overgrown
terraces, rusted stands, a symphony of
wind through
bare branches
hanging about the places we gathered
A dutiful army passes,
marching from Cathcart to Mount Florida
Tartaned by the crest of Prospecthill.
An unexpected shiver on the return.
Like a coat taken for granted inside,
and left on.
by Donna Matthew, Makar of the SWNT Poets’ Society
——————————-
Losing History
When you lose your history you lose yourself:
you exist on scraps fed up by others.
Who’d be careless enough to lose their past?
How’d it happen? Left on some ink-stained desk? Dropped down the stank?
Left to rot in old books that are never opened?
With no history we wander like mad people in
a mad country. Scotland, in other words:
the only country in the modern world
where half the people are scared stiff of their
own beginnings. Aye, of course, history is bunk, a set of lies agreed upon, blah blah.
But this is your grandma’s history or her father’s : how working men and women
made a Scotland they could watch and believe in, could destroy the English at last
in battlefields that were beautiful,
fortresses that weren’t built of turrets and battlements but passion, equality and love. This is a history within our reach, and we owe it to them, to ourselves, to hold it close.
by Hugh McMillan, Curator of the Hampden Collection
The Hampden Collection 