Editor’s note: This is an adapted excerpt of a piece first published on The Athletic in July 2022 looking at the derivation of the names of English football clubs.
There are only a handful of English professional clubs who are not named after a geographic town, city or district.
Two play in the Premier League. Arsenal’s origins are actually south of the River Thames, where the Royal Arsenal once stood in Woolwich, south-east London. Originally known as the Woolwich Warren, the complex was used for the manufacture of armaments and ammunition, as well as organised proofing (tests to ensure the weapons worked as intended) and research into explosives for the British armed forces.
It was employees at the arsenal’s Dial Square workshop — a turning and engraving studio named after the sundial that hung over its main entrance — who first explored the possibility of setting up a football club. That might have happened as early as 1884, though the more accepted date is December 1886. The club, initially called Dial Square, became Royal Arsenal, then Woolwich Arsenal, and eventually Arsenal when they relocated from Plumstead to Highbury, in north London, in 1913.
Flitting back across the Thames, Crystal Palace’s name stems from Sir Joseph Paxton’s vast glass and iron building first erected in central London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition in 1851 and subsequently rebuilt south of the river on Sydenham Hill. The site, among the English capital’s highest vantage points at 367ft (112m) above sea level, effectively became the nation’s greatest pleasure park, hosting the FA Cup final from 1895 to 1914.
The huge glass structure, flanked by imposing water towers, housed the spoils of the British Empire until it burned down in 1936. But, while that corner of south London is now known locally as ‘Crystal Palace’, the area was always more accurately Upper Norwood, Anerley or Upper Sydenham.
Vale Park, home of Port Vale, in Burslem, Staffordshire (Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)
Now that Forest Green Rovers, based in the Gloucestershire town of Nailsworth, have dropped into the National League, the only other club across England’s top four divisions whose name appears to bear no relation to a place is Port Vale of League One.
The Midlands club, based in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, are enduring a difficult season and sit bottom of the third tier. But, having already eliminated Sunderland of the top flight in the previous round, they will visit Premier League Chelsea on Saturday in the FA Cup quarter-finals.
Only once in their 150-year history have they reached an FA Cup semi-final, and that was way back in 1953-54.
When it comes to the origins of their name, it is worth acknowledging from the outset that documentary evidence from late 19th-century Staffordshire is relatively scarce. What is clear is that, these days, there is no defined place called ‘Port Vale’ in the Potteries — the industrial area halfway between Birmingham and Manchester famed for its ceramics and encompassing the towns of Burslem, Hanley, Longton, Fenton, Tunstall and Stoke (which now make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent).
But there was.
It was part of what is now known as Middleport. A ‘Port Vale Street’ (originally Bag Street) remains to this day, linking Newcastle Street with modern-day Yale Street on the east bank of the Trent and Mersey Canal.
There, in around 1832, the Port Vale Wharf was opened; a gateway for goods to be transported north up the canal, which had first been used in 1777, to Runcorn on the River Mersey and, thereafter, exported around the world. An Ordnance Survey map of Longport, the Potteries and Newcastle-under-Lyme from 1832 clearly indicates “Port Vale Wharf”.
Burslem and Longport in the Potteries, and the Trent and Mersey Canal in around 1860 (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The wharf would eventually close when improvements in rail and road links eclipsed the reliance upon England’s extensive network of canals — the site where the wharf once stood is now occupied by a manufacturing company — but, for much of the 19th century, it thrived.
And, perhaps as a shortened version of Longport Vale, the area was known locally as Port Vale.
Listings in the local newspaper, the Staffordshire Sentinel, referred to incidents happening in or to inhabitants of ‘Port Vale’, whether in their classified listings or death and marriage announcements.
A clipping from the Staffordshire Sentinel from January 13, 1855, referencing a cheese auction in ‘Port Vale near Burslem’ (Staffordshire Sentinel)
There was a Port Vale cricket club that existed as late as 1874. The Port Vale Corn Mill, also known as Middleport Flour Mill, a five-storey brick building which opened in 1844 still stands, although dilapidated, on Milvale Street.
There was a Port Vale Inn on Burgess Street, running parallel with Port Vale Street a few roads down, while the Port Vale Brickworks were on the opposite side of the canal, on Orford Street. There is a Vale View one road further back.
Perhaps most significantly of all when it comes to the football club, there was the imposing Port Vale House on Limekiln Lane (now Scott Lidgett Road), again on the canal’s west bank. The property stood on almost two acres of land, and included stables and a coach house. Club records suggest that, in January 1876, a meeting took place here at which members of Porthill Victoria cricket club discussed the formation of a football club.
Those present included Enoch Hood, his brother Jack, Billy Poulson, Sam Gater and William Powner, all of whom became club stalwarts. There was a second meeting a few days later, at nearby Amen Corner. From those get-togethers, a football team emerged — a club that might have taken its name from the venue of its inaugural meeting.
Enoch Hood was the club’s first captain. His brother Jack scored their first goal.
Burslem Port Vale in 1896 (Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
More likely than referencing Port Vale House, though, is the theory that the new club was merely reflecting the area from which it had sprung.
The respected club historian Jeff Kent, author of The Valiants’ Years: The Story of Port Vale, has suggested it stemmed from that valley of canal wharves — the loading point on the Trent and Mersey canal. So, while Port Vale may not exist as a place now, it most definitely did when locals came up with the idea of forming a football club.
The team initially played at the Meadows, a field at the bottom of Limekiln Lane in Longport, before moving first to Westport Meadows — which was prone to flooding and is now Westport Lake — and, in 1884, to nearby Burslem.
The view from the tower of Hanley parish church in around 1932, with Port Vale FC’s then home, The Rec, bottom right (Spencer Arnold Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
As founder members of the Football League’s Division Two in 1892, they adopted the name Burslem Port Vale. The ‘Burslem’ was dropped in 1912 when they bought the Old Rec ground in Hanley, and was not readopted when they returned to the town in 1950 to set up home at what remains Vale Park.
That stands about a mile away from where the original club was founded.
At Stamford Bridge on Saturday, Jon Brady’s League One strugglers will be backed by 6,000 travelling supporters bellowing out the name of a corner of the Potteries that has long since been swallowed up; an area lost as Middleport and Longport grew, and the significance of the Trent and Mersey Canal waned.
It might have been forgotten altogether had it not lived on through the name of the local football club.
