Sport in the United Kingdom fans to sit behind an athletics track. This means that athletics stadiums have to be separately financed and this can only be done with public funds, which have not been forthcoming on a large scale. The largest athletics stadium built in the United Kingdom between Second World War and the 2010s, the 38,000-capacity City of Manchester Stadium built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, was reconfigured for football-only use after that event. For many years, the largest existing stadium was the 25,000 seat Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield, and London's largest athletics venue was Crystal Palace, which has just 15,500 permanent
Don Valley Parkway north along the river valleys had been lumbered and farmed, such as at Milne Hollow, but several natural areas remained by the 1950s. The forests of the Don valley had been where Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton spent much of his youth in the 1870s studying animal life. The Don Valley Parkway was not the first highway planned through the valley. In the 1930s, a "speedway" through the lower valley was promoted as possible depression relief. Unlike today's parkway, this road would have curved northwest near the Don Valley Brick Works and connected to Mount Pleasant at Davisville. The city