Billericay Town - the story of their home ground

New Lodge feels exactly like the sort of ground Spectata was built for – modest from the outside, but full of clues that this place has seen far more than its size suggests.

From borrowed sports field to home

Billericay didn’t always have a proper football ground to call its own. For decades they played on pitches like Archer Hall, essentially open fields with ropes rather than turnstiles. In 1970 they moved into New Lodge, a former sports ground used by Outwood/Common‑area football that was enclosed with the help of loans from Basildon Council and Charrington Brewery, adding dressing rooms and a clubhouse.

That step – fencing the pitch in, building somewhere to change, somewhere to share a drink afterwards – is what quietly turned Billericay Town from a team into a club with a *home*. You can still feel that origin story when you walk through the turnstiles; it’s a stadium that grew outward from a single pitch rather than being dropped in as a finished product.

A ground that grew in pieces

New Lodge spent most of its life doing what good non‑league grounds do: evolving in bits and pieces whenever money appeared. In the mid‑1990s they bought two second‑hand stands from Newbury Town’s Faraday Road after that club went bust, installing one by the old “Cowshed” and one at the Blunts Wall Road end, later adding seats there.

Covered terracing was bolted on alongside a small 200‑seat main stand, and by the mid‑2010s you had a classic patchwork ground: metal terraces behind both goals, a low main stand with extra cover beside it, and a mixture of seating and standing opposite. It wasn’t symmetrical, it wasn’t perfect, but it had character – the sort of place where you recognised every angle in photos because nowhere else looked quite like it.

Chelmsford City shared the ground between 1998 and 2005, adding extra life to the place and underlining that New Lodge had become one of the more established venues on the local non‑league circuit. By summer 2017, capacity had reached around 3,500, with roughly 424 seats and about 2,000 under cover.

The 2017 rebuild and the murals

Then came the big jump. In 2017, during the Glenn Tamplin era, New Lodge was almost completely rebuilt. Both ends were given full‑width covered terraces, a new seated stand – the Harry Parker Stand, later renamed after Tamplin – went up alongside the clubhouse on the old Cowshed side, and seating opposite was extended to run the full length of the pitch.

The effect was dramatic: a ground that had looked like a typical, slightly improvised Isthmian venue suddenly felt like a compact, almost all‑covered modern stadium with a capacity of roughly 4,600 and around 1,600 seats. Outside the Harry Parker/Glenn Tamplin Stand, the club added a huge run of murals – a technicolour wall of Billericay imagery that turned the rear of the stand into one of non‑league’s most recognisable backdrops.

For a while the ground even carried a corporate name, the AGP Arena, after a sponsorship deal, though New Lodge is the name most fans still use and the one that feels right for a place with this much history. Standing inside, you get a strange but compelling mix: the bones of an old non‑league ground with the skin of a modern project.

The pitch and the community hub

New Lodge is not just about the stands. In 2020 the main pitch was converted to a 3G artificial surface, partly to fix long‑running drainage issues and partly to turn the ground into a seven‑day‑a‑week community hub. Levelling work reduced a pronounced slope, and the new surface now supports not just the men’s and women’s first teams but a huge club structure of youth and community sides.

That fits the way locals see the place: as a focal point for football in Billericay, from under‑7s to walking football to senior teams. So when the ground was registered as an Asset of Community Value in 2018, it made perfect sense – New Lodge is as much a civic space as a stadium.

What it feels like to stand there

On matchday, New Lodge feels enclosed and intimate. Both ends have small covered terraces with a row of pillars across the front; they are raised slightly above pitch level so you get that nice “looking down on the six‑yard box” angle when the ball is whipped in. The main stand side is a mix of seating and club buildings – hospitality, offices, the social spaces that keep a non‑league club alive – while opposite the long, low family stand offers four rows of seats that run right along the touchline.

There are quirks too, like the large tree in the corner near the entrance that peers into the ground, a reminder that this is still a stadium tucked into a suburban edge rather than a concrete island. Under lights, with those murals at your back and the 3G pitch glowing under the floodlights, New Lodge feels bigger than its official capacity – a ground with decades of improvisation, ambition and community work baked into every stand.