Part Three of ‘Bootham Crescent: A Second Home’ is now available and covers the period 1993 — 2025.
Written by club historian Paul Bowser, it is a hardback production of approximately 370 A4 pages, and completes the story of York City FC’s near-90 years residency at its much-loved home.
This volume retells three tumultuous decades in the history of the ground, and covers the events which would lead to its eventual demise and set the club on a protracted path to the LNER Community Stadium.
The 1990s saw the team establish itself after promotion, and further demonstrate the club’s giant-killing pedigree by disposing of Manchester United and Everton in the League Cup. Sadly, relegation followed as the decade ended, and the emergence of Bootham Crescent Holdings in 1999 led to the ground and club being imperilled in the early years of the new millennium. Although the Supporters’ Trust and fans rallied to save both, those dark days signalled the beginning of the end of City’s second home.
Thereafter, the club would experience some wonderful highs but crashing lows, with the celebrated Wembley-twice achievement of 2012 a joyous distraction from the saga of the move. Bootham Crescent would also host rugby league on a regular basis, but the ground’s lingering farewell was further impacted by the terrible global pandemic.
Those final days of Bootham Crescent and its disposal, and the eventful early years in the Community Stadium are also covered in rich detail, including the heartache ending to the 2024/25 season. The new stadium is also celebrated, as it too has evolved in a short period of time.
The book, as with the first two, concludes with a series of statistical appendices, and illustrations of programmes and tickets from the last 30 years or so.
The passage of time has, regrettably, resulted in increased production costs, and this book includes many more colour images and also contains a third more pages than its predecessors. I have been able to absorb some of the increases, to enable the book to be priced at £35 per copy, plus postage. It can be purchased in three ways: