I’d heard so much, over the years, about Arsenal FC’s legendary “marble halls” in its 1930s stadium at Highbury, that I imagined them to be like the BBC’s evocative Broadcasting House, crossed maybe with the Roman baths of Caracalla. The imposing flight of steps outside, flanked by art deco lamp standards and a uniformed commissionaire, certainly suggests something special, backing up Arsenal ’s reputation as the toffs’ club with City of London connections.
The old place, awash with memories, is now hosting its last season before the club moves to its huge new stadium at nearby Ashburton Grove. It will live on to become an urban apartment village of more than 700 homes. So it was a shame to find that the marble halls are just a bit of sports writers’ hyperbole. Once you’re through the (listed) double doors of the Highbury stadium, you find yourself in a rather poky lobby made of painted concrete. That’s the hall, and there is only one.
It boasts, however, a gleaming Epstein bronze bust of Arsenal’s celebrated manager of the 1930s, Herbert Chapman, flanked by two small panels of, indeed, marble. A rather good staircase curls up and away, like a Thierry Henry free kick. The presence of a crowd of awestruck fans on a guided tour confirmed that the place is regarded as a sporting shrine. It will remain, as an entrance to the apartments to be built in this famous East stand.
Upstairs, the chief executive’s office and boardroom are as comprehensively wood-panelled as anything in the Square Mile. There, guests get a superior lunch, accompanied by a nice bottle of Aloxe-Corton Burgundy. Well, it’s the vintage colour of the players’ shirts this season. The people being entertained by managing director Keith Edelman these days tend to be property investors and financiers rather than sportspeople — because the plans for this stadium are unprecedented.
British stadiums have been redeveloped before, though not like this — usually they are in low-value areas, so become retail malls or industrial parks. Existing clubs from Norwich City to Leyton Orient are building new homes around their grounds, while Crystal Palace and Chelsea have incorporated respectively a supermarket and hotels and restaurants into their stands, but this is very different. Arsenal has played a high-stakes juggling game right across north London as it has relocated a council waste transfer station to build its new stadium, freed hectares of land for housing around the new sites, and sold them on. Highbury, however, is its soul, and Edelman and his team are handling it themselves. Manager Arsène Wenger has declared that the scheme “will let the spirit of Highbury live on”. This is Monopoly stuff, with hundreds of millions of pounds of borrowing. Those City contacts have been well worked over.
But they’ll get their money back on their conversion of the old stadium, and handsomely. When Chapman engaged architects Claude Ferrier and William Binnie to build his East and West stands in the 1930s, he was creating something lavish by the low-spending standards of the day — maybe that’s where the “marble halls” myth originated.
Football was a working man’s sport, and this bit of Highbury — getting on towards Finsbury Park — was tucked into a poor, industrial bit of town. Not any more. Although there are council estates nearby, there are also streets of rapidly gentrifying Victorian terraced houses. Posh Highbury starts just a few yards south, in Highbury Barn at the top of the hill where expensive foodie shops are to be found. Various celebs occupy the big houses around Highbury Fields, a short walk away. I’ve seen Clive Anderson, a Gooner fan himself, walking his dog there. Nick Hornby used to complain about the prices in the cheese shop.
So it’s no surprise that the Arsenal stadium scheme aims to pull Highbury property values north a little. The flats will range in price from £230,000 for a studio, high in the roofs of the stands, to well over £1m — possibly several million — for the four three-bed triplexes to be built behind the distinctive deco fan-glazed ends to the two original stands. The scheme is not even launched on to the market until next month, and already, according to Edelman, interest among potential owners and investors is high enough for them to consider accelerating the construction programme.
Architects Allies and Morrison — clean-cut modernists known for their expertise on historic buildings — are working with English Heritage to make sure that all the salient features of the stands are preserved, including the architectural mouldings running along the front of the main tier of seating. As partner-in-charge Chris Bearman admits: “Construction-wise, it’s quite complicated.” That’s a bit of an understatement.
In case you were wondering — no, they can’t fit flats around the steep rake of the stadium seating. The two historic stands will be gutted and rebuilt within their walls, then roofs will be put on top that will closely resemble the industrial look of what’s there now. Being built of a mix of steel, concrete and brick, the old stands are not exactly straightforward things to perform surgery on.
That accounts for the east and west sides of the ground: meanwhile the North and South stands, relatively undistinguished stuff from the 1960s and early 1990s, will be demolished and replaced by new housing blocks of equivalent scale. Set behind those will be other blocks arranged around garden courtyards. These — because they will be faster and easier to build — will be the first to be finished.
So: what’s going to happen to the pitch? Arsenal’s turf is famously well tended. The day I saw it, at close quarters, it was perfect — dense, even, verdant grass, not a mark on it apart from the statutory white ones. Wenger allows no events other than football to take place on the tight little pitch, where the fans are almost close enough to the players to touch them. This intimacy carries through to the housing scheme. The stadium becomes a new landscaped London garden square — a keyholder square, consisting of a sequence of small gardens laid out on a grid pattern by award-winning landscape architect Christopher Bradley-Hole. The difference between this and most such traditional squares is that there will be no road running around it to separate the homes from the gardens.
That makes it a bit like Kensington Park Gardens in Notting Hill, say — but only a bit. This will be far more formal, and much more overlooked. The view over the gardens is most of the point, though Bradley-Hole has contrived a sequence of private spaces within the little individual gardens that make up the whole. In its geometric rigour, with its hedges and trees, it’s a bit like the mysterious chessboard landscape from Alice Through the Looking Glass. The landscape will be broken up by rectangular glass water features, which make a virtue out of the fact that vents are needed to the big car park that will be built beneath the whole development. Some of the glass fountains will incorporate these vents. One of the enclosed gardens will be a memorial to the many Arsenal fans whose ashes have been scattered on the pitch over the years.
Being so big, the scheme has room also for a crèche, shops, medical centre and an underground fitness centre with pool. These will be open to non-residents — who will also be able to take a shortcut across one side of the square during daylight hours.
Some people might miss the sight of the swarms of fans arriving for matches. The residents of 711 flats just don’t fill the streets like 38,000 fans plus ticket touts all arriving at once. But they’ll be just around the corner at the new stadium, 60,000 of them now, using the same Tube stations. Holloway Road, Finsbury Park and, of course, Arsenal stations make the development well-connected to public transport. And there’s Drayton Park on the overground line, which Edelman and his directors use to make their forays down to the City.
Given that so many of the new developments in this area claim a link with the Gunners, this one — the real one — ought to score. How many diehard fans will buy a place here? Well, given that some of the flats will be built within the very dressing room where striker Ian Wright used to hang out of the window to berate fans, I should imagine quite a few. If they have any money left after buying their season tickets in the new stadium.
