It has been quite a week at the Montgomery Waters Meadow stadium. On Tuesday morning Shrewsbury Town’s squad trained on the pitch and gave interviews before Sunday’s League One play-off final with Rotherham. By the afternoon the city’s mayor was in situ, present to open a new section of the Salop Leisure South Stand. These 550 new rail seats were special, too; they formed the first safe standing section in an English football ground.

“It’s been a very busy week to be honest with you,” says Brian Caldwell, the club’s chief executive. “We’ve got ticketing ongoing, we’ve got arrangements for Sunday ongoing and, obviously, safe standing is finished and ready to go. This year we’ve now created a safe standing area, finished third in the league and got to a play-off final and the Checkatrade final. We’ve had a successful season on and off the park and I think we take great pride in where we’ve come from.”

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Safe standing is an issue long championed by supporters’ groups but is only now gaining traction with those who run the game. For those who back the idea, safe standing is a misnomer; standing is not unsafe in and of itself, they say. In fact, it is a phrase that came into being thanks to Manchester City fans who wanted Standing Areas For Eastlands (the initial name of the stadium now known as the Etihad). Now SAFE standing is here and Shropshire got there first. It remains, however, illegal at grounds in the Premier League and Championship. The fact that the club will have to scrap it in three years if they get promoted is only a small cloud on the horizon.

Shrewsbury’s plan has been 18 months in gestation and a work of grand collaboration. The process was initiated by the club’s supporters’ parliament, channelling the dissatisfaction of some Salop fans who missed the terraces of the old Gay Meadow, lost when the club moved to their all-seat venue in 2007. “A number of fans didn’t want to go in the first place, others missed the atmosphere,” says Roger Groves, the joint chair of the parliament and the man generally credited with having the first brainwave. “We spoke with Jon Darch and thought this could work for us.”

Darch is the evangelist of safe standing. He says he is “someone who hates things that are illogical” and that denying fans the choice to stand at football grounds is one such thing. For the past decade he has devoted his life to the subject, driving a van fitted with a small sample of rail seating up and down the country. He is at the launch, in aviator shades and a fawn shirt looking like a lower-ranking member of the Corleone family. “It’s backbreaking stuff, I can tell you,” he says of his passion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The safe standing area at Celtic. Photograph: Craig Brough/Action Images via Reuters

Darch had been commissioned by the Football Supporters’ Federation to research safe standing in 2011. Through friends in Hanover he learned how it had been applied in Germany. He then got in touch with the company, Ferco, which installed the rail seating. It turned out it was British. Not only that, it was based in Shrewsbury. This was information that was of interest to Groves’ campaign.

“It’s been a supporter-led initiative from day one,” says Caldwell. “I was keen to listen to it, look at it and then to get involved.” With the club covering a third of the £75,000 cost, and another £10,000 raised from the gambling company Fansbet, the majority of the funding came from fans via the crowdfunding platform Tifosy. “I think this was something the supporters felt they wanted,” says Caldwell. “It’s groundbreaking, it’s pioneering, it puts Shrewsbury on the map and we’ve worked really hard to make sure we get it right.”

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The seats were installed by Ferco, which also built the safe standing section at Celtic Park. Rail seating describes a metal seat that can be folded upright to stand practically flat against the row behind it. Above it there is a rail at chest height. This element adds safety, preventing people from falling from one row to another. The seats at Shrewsbury are unlikely to be used during matches but could be during other events, such as when Lionel Richie visits the New Meadow this summer.

Ferco says it has received inquiries from at least half the clubs in the Premier League about rail seating. West Bromwich Albion, recently relegated, were one of those clubs but their application to trial a safe standing area in the Premier League was rejected by the sports minister, Tracey Crouch. There is growing pressure on her to change her mind, not least from the EFL. If Shrewsbury do get promoted to the Championship, and then stay there, they would currently have to tear out their rail seating after a three-year transition.

Few celebrating the new section this week think that will happen. “Every club that’s building a new stadium is asking its architects to plan for rail seating,” says Darch, “People can see that it’s just about choice, allowing the fans that want to stand to stand. The campaign has been 20 years in the making but the argument is being won.”