The weekend Financial Times has a fascinating review of a new exhibition on football stadiums at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North, Home Ground, sited perfectly in a football-mad city where the architect designed both Liverpool’s Anfield and Everton’s Goodison Park, and where the latter club’s huge new 53,000-seat ground sits by the waterside, on Bramley-Moore Dock. It is on until January 25th.
The article is written by an architect but one who clearly has a great knowledge of stadiums and a love of the game. Indeed, he reveals himself as a Fulham supporter.
'In May this year I went to see Fulham, my team, in west London, walking through the red-brick facade designed by Leitch in 1905 (with its now almost laughably slender turnstile doors — early attempts at crowd control).
Instead of standing on the terraces like I used to in the 1980s, I was taken to a new stand, an almost nautical construction now known as Fulham Pier, which sits on the riverside surmounted by a dramatic floating roof. It is all glass and expensive interiors, a gorgeous example of the VIPification of football but one that also (unusually) gives something back to the city with a public Thamesside walk — very different to the old white shed that previously blocked the route
Fulham lost — some things have not changed so much — but the ground retains its intimacy, its thrilling closeness to the players, its painful sense of hope against experience. It used to smell mostly of piss, pies and urinal cakes; now it is more fragrant, with flashes of extreme luxury. Strange, the blend of functional engineering on one side and slick, corporate competence on the other.'
Looking at the history of 'grounds', the Pink 'Un writer notes: 'Those ragged collections of disparate, ad hoc stands, added as the clubs grew, look unrecognisably different to the super-stadiums of today, even if the club names remain the same.
The RIBA show aims to trace the transformations through the unusual lens of architecture. I say unusual because football stadiums seem to stand outside architecture in a way. The field is dominated by a few specialist offices that work globally and the expectation of a stadium is to be visible and identifiable from the outside but to almost disappear on the inside and give way to the crowd, the spectacle and the sport.'
My own non-league ground at Leamington calls itself the Your Co-op Community Stadium but is really a collection of ad hoc stands and Portakabins while we wait for a long promised sanitised council stadium. I will miss what was once known as the New Windmill Ground or Harbury Lane. We won't see a horse looking over the hedge to watch the game!
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