Gillingham Town Football Club is a football club based in

Gillingham, Dorset Gillingham ( ) is a town and civil parish in the Blackmore Vale area of Dorset, England. It lies on the B3095 and B3081 roads, approximately south of the A303 trunk road and northwest of Shaftesbury. It is the most northerly town in the coun ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

. Affiliated to the Dorset FA, they are currently members of the and play at Woodwater Lane. The club also has a reserve side and a women's side.

History

The club was established on 14 November 1879 at the Phoenix Hotel.Club history
Gillingham Town F.C. A successful period starting in the mid-1960s saw them win the Dorset League four times in five season. In 1970 they moved up to the

Dorset Combination The Dorset Premier Football League is a football league based in Dorset, England, which sits at Step 7 of the National League System, or level 11 of the overall English football league system. History The league was formed in 1957 under the ...

. The club finished bottom of the league in 1983–84, but avoided being relegated. In 2001–02 they won the League Cup, beating Westland Sports 2–1 in the final. They were league runners-up the following season, the first after the league was renamed the Dorset Premier League. After finishing as runners-up again in 2007–08, the club were promoted to Division One of the Western League. In 2009–10 Gillingham won the

Dorset Senior Cup The Dorset Senior Cup is a knockout cup competition involving association football teams from the county of Dorset, England, affiliated with the Dorset County Football Association. The current holders of the Dorset Senior Cup are Poole Town w ...

, beating

Wimborne Town Wimborne Town Football Club is a football club based in Wimborne Minster in Dorset, England. They were established in 1878 and won the FA Vase in 1992. They reached the First Round Proper of the FA Cup in the 1982–83 season for the first t ...

2–1 in the final after extra time. A third-place finish in Division One in 2011–12 saw the club promoted to the Premier Division. Despite finishing ninth in the Premier Division in 2016–17, the club resigned from the Western League and dropped back into the Dorset Premier League to concentrate on building their new ground.Gillingham Town FC to quit Western league
Gillingham News, 1 April 2017 In 2021 they were promoted back to Division One of the Western League.

Ground

During the late 19th century and early 20th century the club played at Chantry Fields. After

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

they relocated to a pitch on School Road, now a playing field. The club later moved to Hardings Lane after it was vacated by the Gillingham Show Society. A new clubhouse was built in 1977, and in 2005 floodlights were erected and hard standing laid on all sides of the pitch. In 2018 the club moved to a new ground on Woodwater Lane located a couple of hundred yards down the road, but still use Hardings Lane.

Honours

*Dorset Senior Cup **Winners 2009–10 *Dorset Premier League **League Cup winners 2001–02

Records

*Best

FA Cup The Football Association Challenge Cup, more commonly known as the FA Cup, is an annual knockout football competition in men's domestic English football. First played during the 1871–72 season, it is the oldest national football competit ...

performance: Second qualifying round, 2009–10, 2012–13 *Best

FA Vase The Football Association Challenge Vase, usually referred to as the FA Vase, is an annual football competition for teams playing in Steps 5 and 6 of the English National League System (or equivalently, tier 9 or 10 of the overall English footb ...

performance: Second round, 2007–08, 2016–17

References

External links