The Castings Club was a lawn bowling and tennis club in Falkirk. It now lies empty, used only by vandals and wild animals looking for shelter.
It has sat like this since 2012.
Besides bowling, bowling clubs are known for selling cheap booze so are popular venues for parties. I was in this one a few times over the years for exactly that purpose.
In a previous blog post, I mentioned that I had done a project for college, looking at the changes of my home town of Falkirk. Despite finishing my college course, it's a project that I'd like to see continue. I decided to have a look and see if I could find anything of interest.
It was fenced off, but having been closed for around 6 years or so, the metal fences had been stolen a long time ago.
This shoe was in remarkably good condition. There were lots of them lying about in the changing rooms. I'm guessing this one was only taken out recently. Either that or we should be using bowling shoes to weather proof our houses.
I took these photos at the start of 2017. I've decided to post them now because a) I'm going through my back catalogue in an attempt to catch up with my blog and b) because a month or two ago, the buildings on the site were eventually demolished. I don't know what spurred this on but I'm going to claim that it was my post on Facebook when I first took these photos and then pretend that I'm influential!
I revisited once things had been torn down.
Here's some of that cheap booze I was talking about.
I don't have any real personal connection with the old club. The parties that I attended there are somewhat hazy in the memory , for some reason. So there's no sadness about the loss, for me. Though others will have been affected at the time.
Where the sadness lies here, is that the site sat for years, untouched. Apparently houses were to be built here at some point but I don't know if that's still on the cards. For the last 5 or 6 years, the buildings have been rotting away. And now that they've been knocked down, the site sits abandoned again but with rubble and overgrown grass instead of crumbling buildings and overgrown grass.
A sign of the times.