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Portsmouth celebrate unusual centenary

When Portsmouth host Preston North End in the Championship on Saturday, the club will also celebrate the centenary of their double-decker South Stand, the oldest surviving example of stadium architect Archibald Leitch’s work that is still in use in England.

Between 1899 and 1939, Leitch cornered the stadium market in the UK and Ireland, and he was commissioned to design all or parts of more than 40 grounds, with his signature touches being latticework steel supports on the upper tier’s frontage and distinctive pediments in the middle of the stand’s pitched roof.

Sadly, nearly all of his work has been demolished or radically altered over the years, as clubs have moved to more modern facilities. Rangers, Leitch’s boyhood club, still have modified Leitch designs at their Ibrox home but the only other double-decker still standing in England is at Everton’s Goodison Park, which the Premier League side waved goodbye to last season. Portsmouth’s North Stand is also one of Leitch’s but it is a single-tier design and it is only 91 years old.

Portsmouth owner Michael Eisner, the former Disney boss, is clearly a fan of famous entertainment brands as he chose to spend £4million sympathetically restoring the South Stand. And now the club, with help from the Pompey History Society and Leitch’s biographer/stadium historian Simon Inglis, is opening a permanent exhibition at Fratton Park to tell the stand’s story.

They are inviting two of Leitch’s great-grandsons to the game, as well as the great-grandsons of Bob Blyth, the former player, manager and chairman who persuaded his fellow directors to underwrite the stand’s £21,500 cost, a sum that equates to £1.1million with a century’s worth of inflation.

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