As hopefully many Shrewsbury Town fans will know by now a book entitled "Goodbye Gay Meadow" is currently being printed at the moment with a release date anticipated to be in late October.
Author of the book, photographer Matthew Ashton explains the concept behind it, "The main aim was to create a fitting reminder of what Gay Meadow was to people. I wanted it to be far more than simply a picture book showing a location that football matches were played in. It symbolises a religious place for Town fans and those who loved their football.
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I wanted it to be a 'coffee table book' with a huge emphasis on quality and style. When I give someone a book to look at I want it to say THAT is what Gay Meadow was all about. I wanted it printed on the best paper possible and reproduced in the best possible way."
The book was put together by Matthew and one of the country's leading book designers, Jim Lockwood. Over 300 hours have been put in between them and as we speak the book is now being printed by one of the finest book printing companies in the world.
"As someone who has been going to Gay Meadow since I was five", Matthew said, "I suppose it became all too familiar and one of the challenges was to overcome the hurdle of documenting the ground properly from a fresh perspective. Gay Meadow was so unique and I spent a lot of time wondering around the terraces and the stands in the fear of people watching me think that my head was in the clouds.
Someone watching from the Riverside had a totally different experience to someone watching from the stands. There were so many distinctive vantage points at the Meadow. Views from the Wakeman School, Wakeman End, the Riverside, the stands and what was the away end all dramatically added to my interpretation of the place. "
"The other aspect of creating the book was to remember the ground and its unique location. I wanted to relate the fact that Shrewsbury had a football ground in the town centre. Soon there will be no floodlights to be seen on the town's skyline, views of the Abbey or Laura's Tower for example will be gone no longer will fans walk down Wyle Cop and over the English Bridge or go under the railway bridge and down the Narrows to go and see Shrewsbury Town. One day memories will fade away and so all this had to be in there and it was important to document it properly."
Fans from across the globe submitted their accounts of Gay Meadow via the club's website and the numerous message boards on the internet. With hundreds of articles sent in, these have been accompianed with some amazing photography taken by Matthew and sourced from other photographers who have been working at Gay Meadow over the years.
Matthew explains, "People can say what they want about the pictures inside the book but to me, they purely emphasise what the fans had to say."
"Although I am the author by name, to me the book is also by those Shrewsbury Town fans who contributed to the project and there are some really chilling pieces of literature in there!"
"Some of my favorite pages are the ones about the Wakeman School. As someone who went to Meole Brace School, the amount of young boys who wanted to attend the school because it was adjacent to the football ground really opened my eyes."
"One piece written about a competition throwing paper aeroplanes out of a school window and onto the pitch is priceless."
The book of course covers the infamous coracle, the old scoreboard and the flooding as well as housing some beautiful photography of the ground taken from what is now The Parade Shopping Centre. Matthew told us, "someone was kind enough let me onto the roof for an evening game so I was looking down upon the ground with the river in front of me. Initially it was bizarre not to be in the ground when a game was taking place, it sounded like there were 64,000 in there, not 4,000 - the noise was so loud!"
Our trustworthy photographer came away with a eye catching panoramic image showing the river and the floodlights beaming down with the rest of the town in the background. "As we were designing the book, some believed that it was the best picture in there, but to me it was just a lost picture on a page until I got am email from someone in Germany. This football fan read about Gay Meadow and became magnetised by it.
He literally got on a plane to visit and fell in love with not only the ground but the town of Shrewsbury too. The words that go with the picture to me sum up what Gay Meadow was all about to the people of Shrewsbury."
Matthew tells us that the hard backed book is nearly finished, "The printers have been excellent. They usually spend their time printing 100,000 copies at a time for the big global publishing companies but with the help of Jim, we got them to print Goodbye Gay Meadow for us.
They sent us some pictures of if being printed which was very exciting, they tell us that the pages will be bound together very soon and they will send us a handful books. Then we have to wait at least four weeks as the remaining copies are shipped to us."
