23 years ago today Cheltenham Town celebrated their promotion to the third tier of English football for the very first time in their history in style, with an open-top bus parade through the town.
After a strong 2001/02 season Cheltenham finished fourth missing out on the final automatic promotion spot by just a point. A tense two-legged semi-final play-off followed against Hartlepool United in which the teams were tied 2-2 on aggregate after the second match. However, Cheltenham managed to claim their place in the final winning a closely fought penalty shootout 5-4.
Cheltenham went onto win the final comfortably defeating Rushden and Diamonds 3-1 at the Millennium Stadium in front of 24 thousand fans.
Journalist and lifelong Cheltenham fan Jon Palmer reminisced on the celebrations: “It was a special day, it was the third open top bus tour we’d had in Steve Cotterill’s era, we were like ‘can you believe it’s happening again,'” Palmer explained: “Although we didn’t know it at the time the parade was almost a goodbye after five and a half years in charge.”
On this day in 2002 #ctfc pic.twitter.com/IAFtWo2VtM
— Jon Palmer (@JonPalmerSport) May 14, 2025
During his tenure, Steve Cotterill cemented himself as a Cheltenham club legend securing three promotions in five and a half years. Before he was in charge, Cheltenham had never played in the football league. Palmer continued: “He’d taken the club from the Southern League Premier Division to the third tier.
“It felt like football had taken hold of the town before Cheltenham had never had a professional football club, it felt like a big moment of growth for the club.”
It is estimated that between 12 and 15 thousand people attended the parade to celebrate the Robins’s success, which wound its way through the heart of the town. Palmer believes this promotion cemented Cheltenham’s place as a football league team: “If you are two divisions away from non-league, suddenly you feel as if you belong there. The size of the parade and the amount of people that went to the Millennium stadium on the day of the final showed that Cheltenham had enough fans to be a football league club.”
