The Unprotected Half of First Hampden Goes Up for Lease

City Property Glasgow has put the former Hampden Bowling Club on the market for lease, after rejecting a community bid for the ground of Scotland’s first national football stadium. The 0.72-acre plot at 10 Kingsley Avenue is the half of First Hampden that monument status does not cover.

First Hampden CIC wants a community hub on the old pitch. City Property Glasgow (Investments) LLP holds the site in a commercial portfolio used to service debt, and it has already turned down a community asset transfer and the appeal that followed.

City Property Must Test Commercial Value

The landlord is not a private developer circling a ruin. CPGI is an arm’s-length company owned by Glasgow City Council. A spokesperson said the bowling club plot “is part of the commercial investment portfolio owned by CPGI and, prior to being vacated, was leased to a tenant and generated a rental income.”

That rent matters because of the funder. “CPGI relies on rental income from the commercial portfolio to pay the current debt we have with our funder,” the spokesperson said. “As part of this funding agreement CPGI is obliged to obtain commercially reasonable terms for the sale and lease of our assets.”

Siobhan Crampsey, a leading figure in First Hampden CIC, said the group’s transfer bid was refused, then the appeal was refused too. “They recognise the site as the First Hampden but their intention is to test the value of the site on the market.”

The legal hook is easy to miss. CPGI says it is not currently in scope of Community Empowerment legislation, so the 2015 Act that lets communities force a transfer of public land does not bind this landlord. It runs a voluntary scheme instead, and its own guide is blunt about what that scheme will not touch.

THE LANDLORD’S RULES

• Who can apply: Constituted community, voluntary or religious groups that want the asset purely for community activity, not individuals.
• What is excluded: Properties that are a core part of CPGI’s commercial portfolio will not be considered for transfer.
• The price line: CPGI will seek full market value for assets it does put through the scheme.
• This plot: 10 Kingsley Avenue was judged to have income-generating potential, so the market is being tested.

The company also argues the bowling club was never a public park in the ordinary sense. A membership club ran the greens, so CPGI says the property “cannot be considered in the same manner as publicly owned assets.” Offers, it added, will still be judged on community benefit, heritage, deliverability and financial value, and some early interest is for continued leisure use.

The Fence Between a Monument and a For-Rent Sign

Stand on Kingsley Avenue and the ground looks like two different places. On one side of the fence is Kingsley Gardens, a small public park. On the other is the clubhouse, the old greens and the outbuildings now being let as a leisure unit.

Buried under the park are the brick and stone remains of the 1878 pavilion. After a public consultation from 26 February to 19 March 2026, Historic Environment Scotland designated as a scheduled monument those remains on 13 May 2026. The listing sits on the park. It does not sit on 10 Kingsley Avenue.

TWO HALVES OF ONE GROUND

That split is what a lot of the celebration in May did not catch. Local politicians treated the HES decision as if the bowling club itself had been saved. It had not. Scheduling stops works that would harm the buried pavilion. It does not hand the next-door greens to a community company, and it does not take the plot out of a commercial portfolio.

Second Hampden, later rebuilt as Cathkin Park a short walk away, was itself scheduled in 2025. A scheduled listing can freeze harm. It does not, on its own, fund a living ground or stop a neighbouring plot being let.

Queen’s Park Laid This Pitch in 1873

Queen’s Park, Scotland’s oldest football club, built First Hampden as a ground that could hold big crowds, cup ties and internationals. Historic Environment Scotland calls it the first purpose-built football ground in Scotland and one of the first anywhere. Campaigners and football historians go further and call it the world’s first purpose-built international stadium.

HES sets out how the place worked. The club enclosed the field with fencing, put pay gates on the crowd, and ran a rope around the pitch so spectators stood off the grass. A grandstand, what would now be called terracing, went up on the south side in 1876. In 1878 the club bought a pavilion from the Caledonian Cricket Club and rebuilt it near the entrance.

Dara Parsons, head of designations at HES, called those pavilion remains “a monument to our national game and to the origins of the modern football stadium.” Ged O’Brien, founder of the Scottish Football Museum, said every stadium that hosts a World Cup game “can trace its architectural roots back to that small corner of Kingsley Gardens.”

HOW FIRST HAMPDEN WAS BUILT

1. 25 October 1873: Queen’s Park beat Dumbreck 7-0 in the first match on the new ground, a Scottish Cup tie.
2. 1874: The ground stages the first Scottish Cup final.
3. 1876: A grandstand is added along the south side of the pitch.
4. 1878: The pavilion goes up and Scotland’s national team makes the ground its home; the side is remembered for winning every game it played there.
5. 1882: Scotland beat England 5-1. A black-and-white mural on the old bowling club still shows that score and Andrew Watson, the first Black international footballer, as captain.
6. 1883: The land is sold for railway work. Most of the pavilion is taken down and rebuilt at Second Hampden; the foundations stay in the soil.

The “Scotch professors,” a generation of Queen’s Park players, took a passing game out of this corner of Glasgow and carried it abroad. For decades the story of the first ground sounded like folklore. Graeme Brown, now engagement director for Football’s Square Mile, pinned the footprint on archival railway maps in 2017.

Archaeology Scotland then dug. Fieldwork ran from 6 to 13 June 2021 and from 23 to 26 September 2021. Ground-penetrating radar found the pavilion. Trenches turned up brick and stone foundations, demolition rubble, bottles and clay pipes. A layer of end-on bricks sat about 20-25cm down, read as the base of a later tennis ground.

Football’s Square Mile Covers 21 Sites

First Hampden is one stop on a mapped walk, not a one-off plaque. Football’s Square Mile, opened by The Hampden Collection on 13 June 2021, points visitors to 21 locations across Glasgow that the project treats as the cradle of the passing game. Seven plaques and 14 signs, each with a QR code, were all in place by 23 May 2024.

The alliance around that map includes the Scottish FA, Glasgow City Council, Queen’s Park, Archaeology Scotland and, now, First Hampden CIC. Brown has said the next aim is UNESCO World Heritage status. The Hampden Collection also lodged a designation bid with HES covering all 21 sites.

Brown still talks about First Hampden as a place you can walk onto without a ticket. “You can just come and stand on it,” he said. You can stand on what was the pitch and say this is where Scotland played. That ease is the charm, and it is also why the bowling-club half can be treated as surplus land. There is no museum desk and no till. There is a fence, a park, and a commercial letting.

Football’s Square Mile has sent a formal letter of support for a community-led venture. That letter helps the heritage case. It does not rewrite CPGI’s funding agreement.

What the Lease Listing Offers

Graham and Sibbald are marketing 10 Kingsley Avenue, Glasgow, G42 8BU as a leisure letting, price on application, with a small clubhouse, bar, kitchen, toilets, storage outbuildings and a large grassed area that used to be the bowling greens. The advertised site area is 0.72 acres, also listed as 31,364 sq ft (2,914 sq m), about 2.5 miles south of the city centre and a short walk from today’s Hampden Park.

THE LEASE ON THE BOARD

• Tenure: To let, not for sale, with CPGI saying there is no plan to sell for redevelopment.
• Rent: Price on application; no asking figure has been published.
• Use: Pitched as a leisure opportunity, with some expressions of interest already in, including continued leisure use.
• Address: 10 Kingsley Avenue, Mount Florida, half a mile from the present national stadium.

The vacancy has a paper trail. As of October 2025 the bowling club, on the land since 1905, was on a month-to-month tenancy that had run for 13 years. Club president Will Moffat said a draft 20-year lease that arrived that September was “unsignable” after seven years of asking. Membership was down to 50. Losses ran at £5,000 a year. The club closed in March 2026.

So the asset CPGI now has to re-let is one its own short tenancy helped empty. The company says the market should be tested. The CIC says Glasgow should get a say before that test is treated as the whole answer.

Holyrood Heard First Hampden in September

Locals formed First Hampden Community Interest Company, registered at Companies House as SC875022, and launched the First Hampden For All campaign on 14 September 2026. Calum Cameron, 37, a founding member who lives in the area, said he had “no idea” he was living next to the old national ground until he saw the diggers in the rose gardens.

We want to bring this site back into use as a community hub that provides flexible, affordable space for people and organisations right across Glasgow, on the ground where Scotland helped invent the modern game.

Calum Cameron, founding member, First Hampden CIC

Holly Bruce, Scottish Green MSP for Glasgow Southside, took the case to the Scottish Parliament in mid-September and asked First Minister John Swinney whether the space should be run by the community “instead of sold off to the highest bidder.” Swinney said he needed more time on the legal issues. On 26 September the Scottish Greens published a motion backing the First Hampden campaign, calling for the site to stay open as a hub and a heritage ground.

John Grady, the Labour MP who says the site sits in Glasgow East, wrote to City Property to back the CIC. He posted that letter on 30 September.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Did you know that the site of Scotland’s first national football ground is in the Glasgow East constituency?

I have written to City Property (Glasgow) to express my support for the work that the First Hampden CIC are doing to preserve the site. pic.twitter.com/I8x19XOMDD

— John Grady MP (@johnadgrady) September 30, 2026

By that same date more than 700 people had put their names to the campaign. By 11 October the CIC said almost 1,000 had signed up online. Cameron told a local television interview on 6 October that the ground is “a huge bit of football history and cultural history for Glasgow.”

A Community Bid Still Has to Pay Its Way

The CIC’s own site asks people to back a community-led future for First Hampden, donate toward a feasibility study and business case, and sign a statement that the site’s future “should be shaped by its heritage and its community, not by commercial value alone.” Cameron said the group has asked to sit down with City Property and has not had that meeting. While the transfer bid was live, he said, the landlord told them it could not talk.

The path left is the one CPGI has invited: lodge an offer on the lease, with a study and a consultation behind it, and let that offer be scored beside others. Heritage is on the scoring sheet. So is money. The CIC is trying to raise cash for the paperwork that a commercial bid needs, which is a different sport from a transfer at concessionary rent.

Cameron puts the fight in city terms, not only football ones. “Affordable, accessible public spaces are becoming fewer and further between in Glasgow and in general, and this is another that’s at risk of being lost,” he said. “The city’s slogan is ‘people make Glasgow’, so let’s give those people places to go.”

CPGI still says the outcome of marketing “may not necessarily be commercial.” Until a lease is signed, 10 Kingsley Avenue is a 0.72-acre leisure unit with a famous ghost story under the next-door grass, and a landlord whose funder expects a commercially reasonable deal.