On Sunday 24 August 2025, Vale Park – the Wembley of the North and home of Port Vale FC — will celebrate 75 years of existence. A theatre of hopes, dreams, miseries, and nightmares. A place where time has not stood still, but circled back again and again, echoing with the voices of generations. Vale Park was a place of worship for my grandad, a playground for my mother in the 50s.

We have witnessed triumphs and failures, we have worshipped the heroes and villains who have graced the hallowed turf. From the likes of Roy Sproson and Tommy Cheadle, through Tommy McLaren, Brian Horton, Neville and Mark Chamberlain, Bill Bentley, Kenny Beech, Colin Tartt, Peter Sutcliffe, Russell Bromage, Steve Fox, Ernie Moss, Ray Walker, Robbie Earle, Andy Porter, Martin Foyle, Luke Rogers, Tom Pope, Louis Dodds. And who could forget the curious cast of JJ Hooper, Colin Miles, Craig Rocastle, Rigino Cicilia, Ryan Loft? If John Rudge was our King then Jim Gannon was our court jester.

We boast an almost inexhaustible list of the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. Each name a chapter, each match a memory.

That Ray Walker 25-yard screamer against Spurs – the Bycars erupting in a moment that felt eternal. Joe Anyon’s hopeless failure to deal with a 40-yard free-kick against Chasetown – a reminder that despair, too, has its place. These are not just memories; they are fragments of our shared search for meaning, stitched into the fabric of time by joy and pain alike.

And yet, what is a football ground but a vessel for collective memory? Vale Park is more than bricks and seats — it is a repository of identity, a place where time folds in on itself. Each blade of grass has borne the weight of dreams, each echo of the crowd a reminder that we are, in that moment, part of something greater than ourselves.

My memories as a child is the pungent cocktail of tobacco, beer and ammonia that drifted around Vale Park, a world both vanished and eternal. On the terraces, those adventurers and conquerors weren’t just defending or attacking; these were rituals of belonging and defiance, fleeting bursts of violence providing that sublime aesthetic that both Burke and Kant spoke of, compelling and frightening at the same time.

As we mark 75 years of Vale Park, we do not merely celebrate its past— we confront the passage of time, the impermanence of glory, and the enduring spirit of those who return, season after season, to believe again. The future is unwritten, but the stage remains. New names will rise, new stories will be told. And we, the faithful, will be there — watching, hoping, remembering.

Photographer unknown.