The Life & Death of Highbury

Sean O'Conor reports on the last match at Arsenal's Highbury Stadium

It was fitting that in their last year at Highbury, Arsenal have reached the apex of the club game. Win or lose in the Champions League final, 2006 will also go down as the date when London's most famous football team left England's most historic football stadium for pastures new.

'Chelsea will win fuck all, they've got no history' went a Highbury chant the year before Abramovich & co. bought the title, but the words were significant.

Tradition matters to true football fans, which is why the American practice of franchising à la Milton Keynes Dons raises such heckles in football's homeland.

Matters like team colours, playing style and emblems are important anchors for fan identity since football provides a sense of belonging and permanence in many people's lives.

There is no place like home, and for ninety three years since the team that began as Dial Square FC in Woolwich, South East London moved north of the river after failing to agree a merger with Fulham, home has meant a corner of North East London as emblematic as a church is to its faithful flock.

Designed by renowned UK stadium architect Archibald Leitch and finished with art deco facades by Claude Waterlow Ferrier, the Arsenal Stadium became a true cathedral of the game, hemmed in by terraced houses on four sides in a classic English football setting that would be unthinkable for a stadium planned today.

The North Bank, destroyed by bombs in World War II and expensively rebuilt in 1993, will be demolished again, as will the clock end, but at least the listed art deco facades of the old ground will survive the conversion to apartments, so soccer pilgrims may continue to imagine the passion that used to live therein.

Highbury was the scene of so many famous Arsenal games as well as the 1934 'Battle of Highbury' when England, featuring seven Gunners, defeated the World Champions Italy 3-2.

Other famous days at Highbury included the Busby Babes' last match before the Munich disaster in 1958, the first game broadcast by radio in 1927, the first televised football in 1929 and a world heavyweight fight between Muhammad Ali and Henry Cooper in 1966.

The stadium on Avenell Road was the subject matter of a 1939 thriller 'The Arsenal Stadium Mystery' and provided the unedifying memory of BBC TV presenter Jimmy Hill running the line at a game against Liverpool in 1972 after the referee had pulled a muscle.

Proof of its importance came in 1932 when legendary manager Herbert Chapman successfully persuaded London Underground to change the name of the nearest tube station Gillespie Road to Arsenal.

But, for all the wistful mythology, Highbury has in fact been a pale shadow of its former self for the past few seasons.

The first signs that football was changing and leaving its social origins began when Arsenal redeveloped the historic Clock End in 1989 into an ugly block of 48 executive boxes with the real fans symbolically and physically relegated below them.

Manchester United's relentless expansion of Old Trafford to over 70,000 had left Highbury marooned with only 38,000 seats and fewer revenue possibilities in comparison.

Once the club's board, led by David Dein, found the newly-monied local residents opposed to expansion the writing for Highbury was on the wall.

The community that had sustained the club for so long had migrated. Those living next to the stadium were no longer football-mad white working class Londoners but a mix of middle-class professionals without a football background and overseas immigrants, predominantly Turkish and Moroccan, who have yet to show a large scale loyalty to their local club.

Instead, the red and white hordes headed after the match not to a front doorstep in Islington but Finsbury Park station, with its connections to other parts of London, Hertfordshire and beyond.

The atmosphere around the crowded little streets where the Arsenal players used to jog for fitness in the pre-war years had changed too.

As the neighbouring community had altered, the stadium had become a fortress in more ways than one, as the club prosecuted a prolonged and needless campaign to bully the small traders in the area into removing the Arsenal name and logo on their merchandise.

An obscene fight which went all the way to the European Court before the multi-million pound business finally defeated the poor and struggling independent traders who gave so much life to the Highbury matchday experience.

The stalls were still there until the end, it was just that their racks were filled with the same official Nike merchandise and had lost all personality as a result.

Even the sacred club emblem, a noble Victorian cannon with gothic lettering and a latin motto was replaced by a badge in 2002 so wimpish it looked like a children's TV logo.

The final sell-out was the corporate naming of the new stadium, a sponsorship that will not last forever and will not give the fans the sense of permanence the name of Highbury did.

But then soccer is a product these days isn't it, and we are but consumers loyal to a particular brand?

The decline and fall of Highbury was sad given its symbolic grandeur for so many years but ultimately change was perhaps inevitable.

Perhaps the best tribute will be if Arsenal, a domestic giant but a historic underachiever in continental terms, can end their below par European record and lift the Champions League trophy in Paris against Barcelona.

As a going away present to their old ground, it would be a greater tribute than the crimson shirts the club has memorably worn all season.

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The Life & Death of Highbury

Sean O'Conor reports on the last match at Arsenal's Highbury Stadium

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