It was not always this way. Once football grounds were as deeply idiosyncratic and individual as, well, as our own homes, really. Remember The Dell’s chocolate boxes, the old cinema balcony at Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground, the gigantic throstle on top of the half-time scoreboard at The Hawthorns, Upton Park’s truncated goalposts?
And those majestic stands. The imperious Trinity Road at Villa Park — “the St Pancras of football”, as a Sunday Times reporter called it in 1960 — the gargantuan triple-decker Main Stand at Goodison Park, the saw-tooth roof of Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Molineux Road Stand. These three structures — and many others — were the work of one man: Archibald Leitch, a Glasgow-born engineer and factory architect. Leitch, his life, his work and his legacy, is the subject of a wonderful new book, Engineering Archie (English Heritage, £14.99).
The author is Simon Inglis, who might be said to have first discovered Leitch for the benefit of the nation when he wrote his seminal Football Grounds of England and Wales in 1983. That work, memorably described as “the sports book of the century” by Frank Keating, established Inglis as one of football’s leading writers and historians. What Nick Hornby did for fan angst, Inglis did for all those who had ever risked a road accident while craning their neck to get a brief glimpse of a distant floodlight pylon.
Inglis cheerfully admits to knowing little about Leitch until he completed his epic survey of the 92 League grounds, but for 20 years he has been accumulating more and more information about the man in an extended preparation for this biography.
So who was the man Inglis describes as “football’s designer in chief”? Like so many of the people who shaped Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was a Scot who was fortunate enough to embark on his career at a time of phenomenal technological innovation and growth. “To be an engineer then would have been like being a rock star today,” Inglis said.
He was a factory architect and football does not seem to have formed part of his career-plan until he was asked to design a new ground at Ibrox for Rangers, the club Leitch supported. It is at this point that the story takes a remarkable turn and one that should have meant that his reputation was ruined before it had begun to get off the ground.
The first big match staged at Leitch’s Ibrox was the Scotland-England international on April 5 1902, a day that British football saw its first significant disaster when 25 people died after a section of wooden terracing collapsed. It should have ruined Leitch, but remarkably, his business survived and he found no shortage of clubs willing to engage his services.
He was, for instance, in at the beginning of Old Trafford, when Manchester United moved to their new headquarters from their smoky, polluted former home at Clayton. He built the main stand at Anfield as well as across Stanley Park at Goodison, he designed the West Stand at White Hart Lane, the Main Stand at the newly opened Stamford Bridge and helped Arsenal with the move to Highbury (although the listed Art Deco East and West Stands are not his work).
His real masterpieces, though, were for Fulham, Aston Villa and Rangers. In West London, he designed the famous cottage in the corner of the ground and the impressive brick-fronted Stevenage Road Stand. Both, happily, now enjoy listed status and are protected from the sort of treatment meted out to Aston Villa’s Trinity Road Stand.
With its stained glass windows, Italian mosaics and sweeping staircase, the Villa structure was a bold statement (even if the architectural style was decidedly retro in the mid-1920s), but that did not stop the club demolishing it in 2000 to make way for a replacement that might best be described as cheap and cheerless. Inglis, a Villa supporter, has two words for the men who oversaw the destruction. One is best not repeated in a family newspaper, the other is “philistines”.
There was a happier ending for his equally magnificent South Stand at Ibrox, opened in 1928. Demolition was also a possibility here, but Rangers instead embarked upon a costly and sophisticated redevelopment that preserved its stunning frontage.
Inglis is keen to point out, though (and here is the paradox that undermines the lazy, sepia-tinted assumption that older means better) that Leitch generally produced uniform designs that, first and foremost, met the stringent budgets of the clubs. He was not so very different, then, from the men building today’s new grounds.
Well written, forensically researched, elegantly designed and sumptuously illustrated, Engineering Archie is a book that must command a place on the shelf of every discerning fan.
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