Abbey Stadium

Template:Football stadium The Abbey Stadium is a football stadium in Cambridge, England. It has been the home ground of Cambridge United F.C. since 1932, and currently has a maximum capacity of 9,617 spectators.

The first match ever played at the Abbey was a friendly against a team from Cambridge University Press on 31 August, 1932. The record attendance at the ground (15,376) was also for a friendly, against Chelsea to mark the first use of the ground's new floodlights on 1 May 1970. This was the first time an English League ground's record crowd had turned out to watch a friendly.

The Abbey consists of:

• The Main Stand - a single-tier, all-seater stand running the length of the pitch.
• The Habbin Stand - a single-tier, all-terraced stand, opposite the Main Stand and named after Harry Habbin, a famous fan from the Club's early days.
• The North Terrace - a single-tier, all-terraced stand running three-quartes of one end of the pitch, known among fans as the Newmarket Road End (for obvious reasons).
• The South Stand - a single-tier, all-seater stand, opened in 2002, officially (but not often) known as the 'Heritage Conservatories Stand' after the company won a competition to sponsor the stand in early 2004.

The club planned to redevelop the ground (including building an all-seater stand on the North Terrace with new accommodation for the club's staff and incorporating a medium-sized hotel and new function room into the site), but after a series of financial crises, the club sold the ground in November 2004 to Bideawhile Ltd, a company partly owned by Cambridge United director John Howard, on a sale and lease back scheme for a reported GBP 2 million. The club's supporters have since launched the Cambridge Community Stadium Trust, which is striving to buy back the ground, a step that is seen as necessary to secure the club's long-term fiancial security.

On Friday 26th and Saturday 27th of May 2006, the Abbey Stadium hosted Cambridge's first major outdoors pop concert under the title Abbey Aid. The capacity of the ground was, however, reduced for this event to around 7,000, all of which was standing accommodation on the pitch. This was due to a failure to gain a safety certificate for the ground's stands as they were built without dynamic loading protection, a necessary feature for stands at a music concert. However, the concerts only attracted approximately 1,000 paying spectators on each night - well short of the numbers the club had anticipated - and the events ended up losing money.[1]

Address

Abbey Stadium
Newmarket Road
Cambridge
CB5 8LN

Reference

• Ballard, J & Suff, P - The Dictionary of Football (Boxtree, 1999) ISBN 0-7522-2434-4

External links

• The Abbey on Cambridge United's Official Site
• The Abbey on The Internet Football Grounds Guide
• Map of the Abbey
• Community Stadium Trust homepage

52.21136°N 0.15300°E / 52.21136; 0.15300