The mum who's spent 40 years making football mascots at home

The first things you notice when you walk into Angela Hallam's home are a burger made out of styrofoam and a framed photo of a bulldog mascot above the fireplace.

When we meet the 71-year-old in her living room, she is sat on her red sofa, looking through a scrapbook filled with memories of almost 40 years spent designing and making football mascots.

Her long history of working with clubs across the country starts in Coventry in 1987 where Hallam, who had built a career designing fancy dress costumes for shops, was asked to make a mascot for Wolverhampton Wanderers FC.

"The next thing I knew I was doing the first Wolfie - then I did the first Leicester City, Derby County, Aston Villa, Coventry City, Birmingham City [and] West Brom [mascots]," she said. "I was there first."

After years of hooliganism dominating the game, football clubs in the late 1980s were looking to rebrand as family-friendly organisations.

Part of that, Hallam said, was bringing mascots to the UK in a bid to emulate American sports teams.

Amid this push, her mascot career took off almost overnight, with an order book filled with teams requesting their designs a year in advance.

"I could phone a club and say, 'do you want a mascot?' So it was quite lucrative back then," she said.

Over the years, she has designed and fixed hundreds of mascots including Lenny the Lion for Shrewsbury Town, Harry the Harrier for Kidderminster Harriers, Bobby the Buck for AFC Telford United and Swifty for Walsall FC.

As a one-woman team, she worked out of her living and dining rooms while raising her two young children by herself.

But despite an early boom in business, Hallam soon found herself competing with big companies based in London after they realised there was a market for mascots.

"The big companies got in on the act, and staff at the clubs changed, so I just had to try and keep up as much as I could," she said.

Determined to not lose business, Hallam took a creative approach and became the "mascot doctor" when the annual Mascot Grand National started in 1999.

Every September for 11 years, dozens of mascots would spend the day racing to see who was the fastest.

"I was learning about what makes a better costume at the same time because I was actually talking to the people who wear them, and I don't think some of the bigger companies did that," Hallam said.

"That's probably what's kept me going and people coming back."

A lifelong artist, Hallam - who now lives with her husband of 20 years and two cats - still designs mascots for numerous football clubs and welcomes them back into her home when they need cleaning or fixing.

"If they have got a solid inside then they will go in the bath, so you will very often see a head in the bath soaking," she said.

Dealing with heavy, thick costumes at home through the summer heatwaves was "a lot", she said, but that has not dimmed her passion for making mascots or focusing on other craft projects such as novelty cushions, knitted fairies and bags.

"I went to see my bank manager once - he was talking about retirement and so on," said Hallam.

"I remember saying to him, 'Picasso did his best work in his 90s, artists don't tend to retire, they just keep going'."

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