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Twenty years ago the home team were struggling to stay in the top flight – today they are struggling to get back into the Football League. But at least they have a nice new ground, complete in almost all respect. By Josh Widdicombe

Outside Oxford train station at one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, no one has any idea what the ­Kassam Stadium is, let alone how to get there. A group of teenagers, who have found some steps to sit on and won’t be moving for anyone, look at me with confusion. A bus driver gives me a shake of the head, implying public transport is too much trouble by half. I settle for a taxi. We pull out of the car park and are overtaken by a bus, whose destination is “Football Ground”.

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TNS, the Welsh side famously named after a computing firm, have kept their initials but have a new name, a new ground – and a new country to play in. Owen Amos reports on the Oswestry border wars

Which two sides with grounds in England don’t play in an English league? There’s Berwick Rangers, of course. And now, joining them in the pub quiz, are The New Saints, of the Welsh Premier League. The Saints, formerly known as Total Network Solutions – them who played Liverpool in 2005 – moved in September from Llansantffraid, in Wales, to Oswestry, half a dozen miles away and over the border in Shropshire.

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Groundtastic, now in its 50th edition, has documented the huge change to British stadiums at all levels over the past 12 years. The fanzine’s co-editor Vince Taylor explains the motivation

For those of us whose pulses quickened at the sight of floodlight pylons towering over neighbouring housetops, and whose idea of bliss was to be stood in the middle of a crowded concrete terrace, the publication of The Football Grounds of England & Wales by Simon Inglis in 1983 was a moment of epiphany. Though it wasn’t quite “the love that dare not speak its name”, nobody before Inglis had articulated this fascination some of us have for football grounds as entities in their own right. He introduced us to Archibald Leitch, the Scottish civil engineer who more or less invented the British football stadium as it existed before the Taylor Report, and also demonstrated that every football ground, no matter how great or humble, generally has an interesting tell to tale.

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Walking to the ground is not only a traditional part of the matchday experience, it’s good for you, too. Strangely, it’s becoming much more difficult to achieve. Pete Green reports

“The pedestrian remains the largest single obstacle to free traffic movement,” said a Los Angeles planning report in the 1960s. Four decades and billions of tonnes of carbon emissions later, some UK planners are seeing the light and pedestrian access figures increasingly in new developments. Except for football stadiums, that is – where careless designs and cheap locations threaten to make walking to the match a thing of the past.

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Crisis clubs have ground problems. Tom Davies reports

Niggling problems with grounds predominate this month. However, there’s been a rare victory for supporters over property developers at Cambridge City, where the Blue Square South club are celebrating a court ruling that they had been fraudulently misled by the firm that bought Milton Road two years ago.

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