HIGHBURY: The Story of Arsenal Stadium
by Bruce Smith
Mainstream £12.99 (July) 288pp

ARSENAL STADIUM HISTORY
by Brian Glanville
Hamlyn (October)

FOUR WEEKS AGO, ON April Fool’s Day, I went on a fool’s errand. I travelled a short distance across North London to see my team, Aston Villa, play at the Arsenal Stadium in Highbury. My father predicted a 7-0 thrashing, which shows how little he knows about football. It was only a very respectable 5-0.

Don’t look away, this is not a football report. I really went for the scenery and to pay my respects. This was Villa’s last visit to Highbury before Arsenal move to a new stadium in August. And although the new stadium is only a few hundred yards from the old, this is no mere side shift. The move redraws the mental map of every North Londoner.

Such seismic, if localised, shifts in the urban fabric happen all the time. Buildings appear where once was a gap. After years of habit you are forced right where once you turned left. In the middle of your own manor you feel lost. Cities are continually reinvented in the subtlest of ways.

But not when it comes to sport in the capital. Only two new stadiums of note have been built in London since 1945. Now this year alone we expect to see two more reach completion, with a third one due, we hope, in time for the 2012 Olympics.

In northwest London, from the Hangar Lane Gyratory to Brent Cross Shopping Centre, all are agog at the scale of the white arch overhanging Sir Norman Foster’s new 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium. It makes his “Gherkin” seem tame. Such scale! Such overspending! Eight miles east, a quite different scene exists. No headlines here. Arsenal’s new Emirates Stadium is on time, on budget, and merges into the background as well as any 60,000- capacity stadium might amid an essentially Victorian suburb. Towering above the Holloway Road shops, its graceful curves appear, even to this stadium buff, laughably and wondrously immense.

Going to the old Arsenal Stadium was one of my favourite London journeys. Eschewing the narrow exit tunnels of the Arsenal Tube station — known as Gillespie Road until, in 1932, the Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman persuaded London Transport otherwise — I prefer to arrive by Silverlink, an overground line that cuts discreetly through some of the dreamiest and seamiest backyards of North London. From Highbury and Islington station it is a ten-minute stroll, skirting the urbane Highbury Fields — refuge of a thousand au pairs and their precious charges — peering in occasionally through the windows of the Islington elite and the fromageries and delicatessens of Highbury Park, their lingering aromas somewhat leavened, as one proceeds downhill, by Turkish kebabs and grease-laden steam from the Arsenal café or the Gunners Fish Bar. Already, this is some pre-match feast.

Then I take a left into a side road lined by 1880s brick terraces and by a London County Council postwar estate, before turning a final corner into Avenell Road (towards the Finsbury Park mosque, preaching ground of Abu Hamza). And there stands the stadium. Amid all this low-rise mumble and jumble, an enormous rectangular white block of Art Deco pomp and circumstance.

Arsenal were English football’s first media darlings, their rise coinciding with that of cinema, radio and early television.

The Prince of Wales opened the West Stand in 1932. Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow and Buster Keaton made appearances. After Chapman died prematurely in 1934 the club commissioned Jacob Epstein to sculpt his bust, which they positioned inside the East Stand’s so-called Marble Hall.

That a football club should have hired two West End architects, Claude Ferrier and William Binnie, to redesign their stadium, was curious enough. That they knew who Epstein was was even curiouser.

But the back story — how Arsenal arrived in this corner of North London in the first place — is even more intriguing. Two books skimming the tale, by Bruce Smith (now out of print but due in paperback in July) and Jon Spurling, have appeared before Arsenal’s relocation. A third, by one of the doyens of the football literati, Brian Glanville, is scheduled for October.

It is to be hoped that Glanville’s book — despite bearing the club’s imprimatur — will tell us more about the extraordinary man, Sir Henry Norris, who almost single-handedly invented the Arsenal legend by moving the club to Highbury in 1913, after 27 comparatively modest years in Plumstead, southeast London. This was ten miles from Highbury — in London terms, another planet.

By all accounts Norris was a hateful character. Arrogant, bullying and without scruple. In short, an ideal football club chairman.

Spurling notes that the Tottenham Herald, fuming that Arsenal should be muscling in on Tottenham Hotspur’s patch, portrayed Norris as the Hound of the Baskervilles. Highbury residents were even less enthusiastic. The Islington Gazette predicted “a sad day for the district if these interlopers set up stall around here”.

Those interlopers are part of the scenery which should give all those associated with the Dome some hope.

It cannot be denied that Arsenal need to move. Highbury today holds only 38,500 people, compared with Manchester United’s 72,000. And on the day that I saw my team humiliated, Arsène Wenger’s current crop of lithe young gazelles, assembled from all corners of Europe and Africa, appeared quite out of place against the 1930s backdrop; like 21st-century sprites beamed into the local Odeon.

In the same year that Arsenal lavished £130,000 on the East Stand — the grandest and most expensive grandstand yet built — Victor Gollancz commissioned George Orwell to document poverty in the industrial North. Next Sunday, that stand will host its final competitive match, appropriately against Wigan.

Don’t even try to book a ticket. But I recommend mingling with the crowds on Avenell Road before kick-off. Highbury on a match day has been one of the quintessential London experiences of the past 70 years.

Next season the East and West Stands will be converted into flats. The pitch will be turned into gardens. And I shall make my annual visit to see Villa get thumped by Arsenal. Only this time I shall turn left out of the station instead of right, and feel the magnetic undercurrent of the city shift a little beneath my feet.

Visit Simon Inglis’s website at www.playedinbritain.co.uk