It’s 51 of my posts counting down to the centenary of Maine Road’s opening game and today I’m looking at the segregation fence in the old Kippax Stand.
On the main photo above you can see the segregation fence as it looked in the early 1990s. The gap between away fans and home fans had increased compared with the image below from the mid 1980s. The police used to patrol up and down this narrow pathway and on the image below you can see some police within that area.
To help the police control the crowd a few simple platforms were constructed out of scaffolding. It all seems so primitive now but I guess clubs were reacting to increasing violence and needed quick solutions. The following was one of several platforms in the Kippax by the end of the 1980s.
Before the segregation fence had an alleyway for the police to walk through there was one fence and scaffolding was erected next to it to separate the fans further (see next two images). Similarly this approach was used to widen the segregation fence at other times in later years.
The single fence with scaffolding to separate fans further (below).
I explain a lot more about this area in Farewell To Maine Road. Formal segregation started in the mid 1970s but not for every game. By the end of the decade it was permanent and in place game after game.
This 1971 image shows the Kippax Stand and the segregation area was roughly where the number 8 is within the stand.
If you’d like to read more on the history of Maine Road, take a look at Farewell To Maine Road, which can be downloaded from this page:
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