Lincoln City Championship Homecoming Parade

The streets of Lincoln are being handed over to the Imps this afternoon, as the club’s promotion to the Championship is marked with a full-scale open-top bus parade through the city.

The celebration begins at 14:30 BST on High Street, at the junction with South Park Avenue, where players, staff and officials will board the bus and roll out into a city that has been waiting years for a day like this. From there, the route cuts straight into the heart of Lincoln life.

The bus will swing on to Tentercroft Street before pressing into the city centre, taking in St Mary’s Street, Wigford Way and Silver Street – roads that on any other day carry shoppers and commuters, but today will be lined with scarves, flags and camera phones. Every corner offers another vantage point, another chance for supporters to grab a glimpse of the squad that dragged the club up into the second tier.

The parade then climbs towards one of English football’s most striking backdrops. The bus will loop around Lincoln Cathedral, the city’s towering landmark, giving players a panoramic view of the crowds and giving the crowds a postcard scene they will talk about for years. Cathedral, cobbles, and a Championship club rolling past on an open-top bus: it fits.

From the cathedral, the convoy moves along Newport and Riseholme Road, carrying the party out of the centre and into the neighbourhoods that feed the club’s fanbase week after week. Faces at upstairs windows, kids on shoulders at the kerb, horns and sirens cutting through the afternoon – this is where the promotion story meets the people who lived every minute of it.

The journey is expected to end at around 16:00 BST at the Lincoln Imp pub, where the formal route concludes but the celebrations almost certainly will not. For Lincoln City, this is more than a lap of honour. It is a statement that a club once fighting to stay relevant now travels through its own city as a Championship side.