It’s a well-worn cliché: football is to us what the gladiators were to the Romans, our stadiums their colosseums. The Colosseum is still there, of course, ruined and all the more evocative for it. Most English football grounds don’t get that kind of afterlife.
They become retail parks, housing estates, a plaque if they’re lucky, or a small fragment preserved like a relic: the centre spot at Maine Road, Manchester, a perfect example.
Highbury is different. It was different even when it was built, the most architecturally ambitious Art Deco football ground ever built in England
And when Arsenal left for the Emirates in 2006, it became something rarer still: a piece of football heritage that survived as a living memorial, a place where people actually live behind facades that look almost exactly as they did when the crowds were still coming through.
This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different remarkable story each week.
Origins: From Woolwich to Highbury
This isn’t a football blog, so I won’t dwell on it. But it’s worth briefly understanding how Arsenal ended up in Highbury at all, because without that story, the architecture makes less sense.
Arsenal is now synonymous with North London. Fans sing ‘North London Forever’ at the start of each match, and they vie with Tottenham Hotspur for dominance North of the River.
But Arsenal actually began life in South East London, formed by workers at the Woolwich Arsenal munitions factory.
In 1912/13, the club was struggling. Chairman Henry Norris, an ambitious property developer who later became an MP, decided the club had no future in Woolwich.
His initial plan was to merge the club with Fulham, who he was also chairman of (imagine that!). The Football League blocked it. So Norris began looking elsewhere, and his logic was simple: the club needed to be somewhere more populous, better connected, closer to the centre. North London, served by the Piccadilly line, was the answer.
Eventually, he landed on a spot in Highbury, a part of London that would then forever be tied to the club. The two local teams – Tottenham Hotspur and Clapton Orient, who later moved further east to become Leyton Orient – opposed the move fiercely. They saw it as a property developer parachuting a club into their territory. They weren’t entirely wrong.
Arsenal would go on to become the dominant force in English football through the 1930s, winning five league titles in that decade alone. Highbury was the stage for all of it.
Arsenal and Art Deco – a match made in heaven
And this is where the story gets interesting.
The original Highbury Stadium was built hurriedly over a single summer and wasn’t anything impressive: basic terracing and a single stan. But by the 1930s, Arsenal were seeing success, and they wanted a stadium to match.
Arsenal were the dominant force in English football. And the dominant force in architecture? Art Deco.
This was the era of George Coles’ glorious Art Deco cinemas, of the Battersea Power Station and Millennium Mills, the Hoover Building and the Daily Express building.
Art Deco had emerged in the 1920s as a reaction against Victorian ornament, embracing clean geometry, bold symmetry, and the conviction that modern life deserved modern beauty. In Britain it showed up everywhere: lidos, department stores, Tube stations, power stations.
Football grounds were a different matter. The era’s great stadium architect was Archibald Leitch, whose work gave British football its characteristic look: decorative ironwork, gabled roofs, a certain functional pride.
But these were never civic buildings. Nobody designed them to face the street with confidence, to look like something the city had chosen to build rather than merely permitted. Football grounds were working class infrastructure, and nobody in authority thought they needed to be anything more.
Highbury Stadium crossed that line, pioneered by Arsenal’s manager Herbert Chapman. (Fun fact about Herbert Chapman – he introduced numbered shirts to English football, and persuaded London Transport to rename the nearby Tube station from Gillespie Road to Arsenal).
To understand why, we need to remember that football’s dominance wasn’t inevitable. At the time, other forms of entertainment were just as popular – especially Speedway, driven by increasing access to cars.
Chapman understood that to draw people in, Arsenal’s stadium needed to be a place people wanted to visit. The architecture was part of that project.
A football stadium that didn’t want to look like one
Herbert Chapman commissioned architect Claude Waterlow Ferrier to rebuild the stands – though he stayed unusually involved, even designing the scoreboard and turnstiles himself.
The result was something unlike anything English football had seen. First the West Stand in 1932, and later the even more impressive East Stand in 1936.
They drew on the language of Art Deco cinemas, civic halls and Tube stations. Geometric styling, symmetrical and elegant. The words ‘Arsenal Stadium’ picked out in red lettering against a composed cream backdrop.
Sadly, Ferrier died in 1935. He never saw his vision completed. But his designs changed the notion of what a football stadium could be. Just look at this quote from Tommy Williams, a football fan who visited Highbury in the 1930s, featured in football magazine FourFourTwo:
“To a lad who worked in a factory in a smoggy old town like Huddersfield, visiting Highbury in the 30s was the equivalent of going to see the Pyramids, or the Taj Mahal.
“My pal Eddie and me used to stand in front of the East Stand and gaze in wonder. It was gleaming white. Brand spanking new. Beautiful.”
The East Stand in particular became the face Highbury showed to the city. Inside, the Marble Halls: a grand entrance lobby with marble floors, bronze busts and wood-panelled rooms that felt closer to a gentlemen’s club than a football ground.
The building helped redefine what a football stadium could be: a dignified part of London life, something that deserved the same architectural attention as a town hall or a cinema.
The life and afterlife of Highbury Stadium
During the Second World War it was requisitioned as a first aid post; later it became the first First Division ground to install floodlights. By the 1990s, following the Taylor Report, grounds were required to be all-seated, and Highbury’s capacity fell from its peak of more than 70,000 to around 38,500.
For a club of Arsenal’s size that wasn’t enough, but expanding was essentially impossible: the East Stand was Grade II listed, and the other three sides were hemmed in by dense residential streets. The ground chosen in 1913 precisely because it sat in a populated part of north London was now trapped by it. In 2006, Arsenal moved around the corner to the new Emirates Stadium, and Highbury was left behind.
Moving to a new stadium is not, in itself, unusual. Grounds across the country have been abandoned and forgotten. But because Highbury was different from the start, things had to be done differently. The East Stand’s listed status meant the Art Deco facades couldn’t be touched, which forced the developers’ hand.
Allies and Morrison designed 711 flats arranged around the four sides of the former pitch, new apartment blocks facing inward toward a communal garden occupying the exact dimensions of the playing surface. The Marble Halls became the concierge entrance, the terrazzo floors with their cannon emblem still underfoot.
These are expensive flats in Islington and not many people can afford to live in them. But the heritage remains largely open: a public footpath allows visitors to see the pitch, and relatives of those whose ashes are buried in the Memorial Garden still make the journey.
It isn’t a perfect outcome. But in a world where football’s history is routinely demolished and forgotten, it is a rare and genuine one.
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