The Hampden Collection Launches 'The Last Stanza'

Saturday 1st November 2025

The Hampden Collection announces a new call for poetry called ‘The Last Stanza’ to spotlight that the 1st Hampden Park site has an uncertain future, and without intervention, we may lose it forever. Hampden Bowling Club, which has protected the site for the last 120 years, will close on 28th February 2026, and there is real concern that this incredible football heritage site could be lost to history.

We are calling on all the volunteers, poets, artists, writers, researchers and friends of The Hampden Collection to make as much noise as possible to agitate and educate on what a significant site this is for Scotland's cultural history, and what a profound loss it would be if we don't preserve its history. 

Our mission is to promote, protect and preserve the 3 Hampden Parks and all who played on them. There are three poetry collections that sit within The Hampden Collection, and is led by our Gaffer, Julie McNeill. 'Braw Words' captures children’s poetic voices celebrating football, and the 'Scottish Women’s National Team Poets Society (SWNT)' and the 'Men’s National Team Collection' capture the story of the national team through their history and current mission to qualify for major tournaments. 

Our Hampden Collection Makars, Gaby Barnby, Donna Matthew, and Hugh McMillan, are encouraging submissions of three-stanza poems to celebrate the Hampden Park legacy. In the first instance, the poems we receive will be published on the Hampden Collection website and across all social media platforms to assist in the campaign to preserve the site. The ambition is to curate an event in February 2026 at Hampden Bowling Club, where they can be performed, with the possibility of publishing the submitted poems in a collection at a later date.

This is ’The Last Stanza’ for the 1st Hampden Site, and our mission is to create a crucible of poetry power and wake up our nation to the importance of the 1st Hampden Park. We have one last chance to save it.

To give you a taster for what is required and the structure of these poems, our Makars have created one poem each to inspire you all to pick up your pen and submit a poem for the Collection. 

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Hat Trick

1st time is never a given 

Never a given it’ll happen 

Never a given you’ll get the shirt

Never a given you’ll make the shot 

Never a given it’ll happen 

- then it does

2nd time is a chance to learn

Learn that winning means losing 

Learn that support means pressure 

Learn that nothing’s done alone

Learn to stick in

- there’ll be another chance 

3rd time is getting the big picture 

The big picture that’s local and global

The big picture that’s girls and boys

The big picture that includes the struggling, not just the strong

The big picture that’s yours and mine

- football hearts beating as one

by Gabrielle Barnby, Makar of the Braw Words Collection

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Ghosts on The Pitch

It’s one minute to midnight,

ghosts on the pitch

bobbing and weaving

our history

willing us to see them.

We leave childhood on overgrown 

terraces, rusted stands, a symphony of 

wind through 

bare branches

hanging about the places we gathered

A dutiful army passes,

marching from Cathcart to Mount Florida

Tartaned by the crest of Prospecthill.

An unexpected shiver on the return.

Like a coat taken for granted inside,

and left on.

by Donna Matthew, Makar of the SWNT Poets’ Society

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Losing History 

When you lose your history you lose yourself:

you exist on scraps fed up by others.

Who’d be careless enough to lose their past? 

How’d it happen? Left on some ink-stained desk? Dropped down the stank?

Left to rot in old books that are never opened? 

With no history we wander like mad people in 

a mad country. Scotland, in other words:

the only country in the modern world 

where half the people are scared stiff of their 

own beginnings. Aye, of course, history is bunk, a set of lies agreed upon, blah blah. 

But this is your grandma’s history or her father’s : how working men and women 

made a Scotland they could watch and believe in, could destroy the English at last 

in battlefields that were beautiful, 

fortresses that weren’t built of turrets and battlements but passion, equality and love. This is a history within our reach, and we owe it to them, to ourselves, to hold it close.

by Hugh McMillan, Makar of The Men’s Team Collection

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Good luck with your poem. Express yourself! Submit your poem into your chosen collection and get involved with the Last Stanza event. Let’s keep football history alive. Please submit your poem here - https://hampdencollection.com/the-world-home-of-football-poetry/