This week’s #FloodlightFriday takes us to leafy Leamington Spa, home of Regency architecture and broad boulevards, colonnaded Royal Pump Rooms and a 19th-century bathhouse. Plus The Brakes who have just suffered the ignominy of being relegated from the North…the National League North that is, back to the Southern League Premier Division Central.

Let’s go back to 2002 though with their very tidy and fact packed fanzine called Windmill Wonderland. It ran and ran in print for well over 13 years, we think first turning out back in 1999. The British Library at St Pancras holds issue 6, 24-28, 30, 32, and 50 if you can wait 70 minutes for them to be delivered while waiting for a train. I have a few more, just ask.

Before we start though let’s get some things cleared up;

• The club was established in 1933 as the works team for the local Lockheed Borg & Beck factory, the nickname Brakes is a result of the products made there
• The club has had various names over the years as a result of this association, Lockheed Leamington then AP Leamington when Lockheed was renamed Automotive Products in 1973.
• Since a split with the company in 1985 and a subsequent hiatus after the “Old Windmill Ground” was lost in 1987 they have been known as the rather more straightforward and sensible Leamington FC. No Spa for these lads.

Where does the Windmill bit come from? Well fortunately I have issue 13 of the fanzine from December 2002 in which, along with Programme and Video reviews, Match Reports and Player Ratings, also contains Part 2 of “Philip Pikes’s History of Leamington FC”. It turns out that the old ground was next to a pub called The Windmill situated near the Tachbrook Road Windmill. That might have been enough but there is more, the club website reveals that the aforementioned windmill was in what was now the pub’s car park, though it had been out of use many years before this..and was demolished in 1968..lovely stuff.

This also contains the news that the floodlights there had been bought from Manchester City and were sold to a security company…This is turning out to be quite some floodlight story and of course there is a dreadful quality photo of the old ground with just one of the (we assume) four sets of floodlights.

The following photo from 1977 sort of helps and comes from the quite superb club history section at https://leamingtonfc.co.uk/index.php/club/history/the-windmill-ground-tachbrook-rd

Is that all we have for you this week? Why no, brace yourselves because we have a fanzine special from 2002 celebrating the erection and official ceremonial turning on of the floodlights at the New Windmill ground. There is a quite magnificent photo of the requisite fanzine quality with one of the pylons and lights in action. There is a problem however…this being 2002 and printing costing money this was a CD-Rom special.

Though there are very clear instructions included the 71 pictures promised were on a CD-rom that was “only tested on Windows 98, ME and XP” and I don’t have access to those any longer…but that doesn’t matter anyway because the copy I received doesn’t have the CD-rom anyway. Never fear though you can see a great example of the photography top left here on the cover of issue 12…which I don’t have either. The “Music to watch the Brakes go by” is eclectic to say the least and a very short playlist..

The internet has come to the rescue with this great photo of a Windmill fairly near the new ground and one of the pitch and floodlights from the air in a plane which possibly has Lockheed parts..

So a cursory tale about the way fanzines shifted to digital media in the new dawn of the early 2000s…and how much of that is now lost. Of course a commemorative book woudl have been expensive to produce and maybe not shifted many copies, the average gate for 25/26 was just 586 after all but surely that lovely print edifice, 71 photos of floodlights, brilliant volunteers and sponsors would have been stored in the archive of the local library or even the British Library, unlike a CD-rom which was probably used to prop up a wonky table or scare birds or something, then sent to landfill. Sigh.