On 27th April 2021, we completed our next major step in our story and have successfully become a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO). Our new name: Hampden Bowling Club SCIO. We will use the power of accessible sport and cultural heritage of being situated on the original Hampden Park to motivate, engage and enrich the local community.
The core offering of our organisation is the bowling club, which provides gentle recreation for all age groups throughout the summer months. During the winter months, this provides a social hub for members to congregate and enjoy social engagement.
All year round, our purpose-built sports pavilion provides an ideal space for local community groups to utilise as a venue for regular meetings, workshops and hold fundraising events. Furthermore, there are opportunities to broaden the club’s sporting activities, which require a hub, including running, cycling and a multitude of other sports.
And finally, there are organisations, who will find this a useful community asset, where a low-cost venue is required to hold events. We have had various charitable organisations hold events at our club, including Tartan Army Sunshine Appeal, Friends of Cathcart Cemetery, Archaeology Scotland and Battlefield Primary After School Association.
Our infrastructure ambition is to #Restore1stHampden, as our grounds are on the site of the 1st Hampden Park, which is the world’s first purposefully built international football ground and is the template for every modern football stadium ever-built. This history requires to be protected, invested, and charitable trust status will open routes to grant funding to upgrade the land and buildings to a modern purpose-built community facility.
This is in conjunction with seeking partners and sponsors, who will provide further funding to restore these grounds. For example in 2019, we announced our partnership with Tennents and also have been working closely with Archaeology Scotland since 2017 on understanding the history of this site. These projects are being run under our Hampden Collection project, which celebrates this wonderful history bringing to life the importance of the site through art, poetry, written word, TV, film, radio, social media and printed press.
The vision of Hampden Bowling Club in 1905 was to create a social hub, which was for the local community to enjoy and sustain. Our mission is to ensure our organisation continues this fantastic legacy for another 115 years and spread its importance throughout the world.
The diversity of our club is the foundation stone of our future.
Our club was created in a completely different world and every day we are making it compatible with the new world and continue to be a core of community for decades to come.
And of course, we are not just a bowling club. We are on a site on arguably the most important football site in the world, where the modern football stadium template was designed. The Hampden stadium legacy is the largest, and most important, collection of football stadiums on the planet.
Our mission is to improve the health and wellbeing of our membership, and in recent years we have become more active in the community to promote this into local South-Side Area and beyond.
The Bowling Club is situated within the heart of the South-Side of Glasgow and will act as a core community asset that offers accessible sport, skills and learning to all groups across all age ranges. There will be a specific emphasis in providing this benefit to the following core groups:
• Those living in deprivation
• Those with poor physical and mental health or living in loneliness
• Those with low engagement with physical activity
Ultimately this hub will provide a safe, secure, inclusive and multiple-use facility for the community to enjoy, act as a base to create positive change in the local area and provide an essential resource to improve the physical and mental wellbeing of current and future generations.
We have significant potential through forging relationships and partnerships with local organisations, who can support our ultimate objective of delivering positive change into the community and continue the fascinating legacy of this site.