Book review: Places we play: Ireland's sporting heritage

Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'Places we play: Ireland's sporting heritage', by Mike Cronin and Roisín Higgins (The Collins Press, Cork, 2011).

For many years sport and heritage rarely converged, but the rise in popularity of sports museums, the concern over the loss of many historic sports stadia, buildings and other sites and rising prices paid for sports memorabilia and sporting art have been linked to ever-growing academic and popular interest in sports heritage, nostalgia and cultural memory. This is, for example, well illustrated by English Heritage and their Played in Britain series, or the recent Sport, History and Heritage: Studies in Public Representation, edited by Jeff Hill, Kevin Moore and Jason Wood (London: Boydell Press, 2012). In Ireland, until recently, heritage has been exploited mainly as an educational or tourist tool, so it is more delightful to see this excellent book, which has its origins in the Irish Sporting Heritage Project (http://www.irishsportingheritage.com). Cronin and Higgins's appealing book is well written and is overall of very high standard of production and presentation. The visual side is as strong as the written content, with many rich, evocative and well-chosen photographs of sites both present and past, and advertisements and rail and other promotional posters for horseracing, golf, Gaelic games and other events. The captions generally add to the text, and from the photographs you often gain a clearer sense of class, gender (with many pictures showing women playing or spectating) and of the importance of age and generation. Indeed, the cover of the book shows young lads road bowling in a country lane in the 1950s.