Afterlives: Highbury

A photo essay exploring memory, imagination and nostalgia in the shell of Arsenal's spiritual home.

It’s a muggy, overcast afternoon in late June. I’ve got four hours to kill between a work meeting in King’s Cross and a pub quiz in Angel.

I’m aware that I’m deep in red and white territory in North London. A faint idea drifts into my head.

I descend deep into the bowels of the underground. Seven minutes and three stops on the Piccadilly Line later, I surface at Arsenal Station. I turn left along Gillespie Road and round the corner. A flash of white illuminates the right hand side of the tree lined Avenell.

I am enthralled. It’s Highbury – Arsenal’s stately spiritual home between 1913 and 2006. And I’m here to break in.

As I inch towards the ground, the frontage of the old East Stand takes my breath away. Though Highbury has long since been transformed into a complex of eye-wateringly expensive high-end flats – worth half a billion according to everyone’s (least) favourite tabloid rag¹ - the iconic eastern façade is still entirely and authentically recognisable.

It’s a 1930s art deco masterpiece, a frosted white confection of a building that’s as much wedding cake as football ground.

In a modern era in which football stadia are built with a utilitarian futuristic sensibility, the marble shell of Highbury puts the visitor in direct connection with the era of Leitch, Ferrier and Binnie. It transports you to a time when stadia were as romantic and aesthetic as they were functional.

I pace along the length of the East Stand and arrive at an imposing metal gate, enticingly propped ajar. Though I’d previously read that the new Highbury flat complex was closed to the public, I take the open gate as an invitation. I round the corner into and stand in the corner of one of English football’s most iconic spaces.

Though I’m looking at the shell of a stadium, the space before me feels incredibly dissonant.

What was once one a shimmering green pitch was now a fenced-in, closed off modern garden. What were once terraces are now glassy, space age apartments.

There’s something incredibly 007 about this whole place. It strikes me that if I were to ever go off the deep end into a life of supervillainy, I’d probably seek to make my HQ some sort of ruined stadium. I found Millmoor in Rotherham quite charming, after all.

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I walk along the face of what would once have been the iconic Clock End. I squint to examine the finer details of the buildings around me.

My eyes scan across the buildings, desperately searching for the famous Highbury terraces.

To my delight, small fissures start appearing in the fabric of this gleaming apartment complex. Through the gaps I can see whispers and traces of what came before.

Blood red girders and beams show the contours of the giant perspex frames that contained spectators in the East Stand. Metal canteleivers provide a fleeting silhouette of the West Stand roof.

Between the two, behind reflective sheets of glass and prison fencing, the aggressively well-kempt central garden echoes the shimmering emerald carpet that once played host to some of English football’s greatest ever teams.

If only I could get on that grass.

I become aware of movement over my shoulder and catch a cig-wielding resident scanning his key card. He busily scurries through a yawning gate into the garden-pitch, eager for his nicotine hit.

This is my chance.

I wait until he is out of range. As the gate starts to close I drop the shoulder like Robert Pires and steal through the gap.

I’m on what was once was the legendary Highbury playing surface.

Adrenalin courses through my body and the childlike football supporter within prepares to re-play the 1978 FA Cup semi-final in my head. This time Albion will win.

I prepare myself to walk amongst a century’s worth of memories.

But as I stalk around the garden, my desire to experience the palimpsestic thrill of being on the Highbury pitch is frustrated.

Everywhere I look, my lines of sight are broken by strategically placed hedgerows and sculptural glass panels. Through all the obstructions, the ghosts of Bergkamp, Wright and Adams remain cloaked.

It’s like Highbury is playing a low block against the very memories and history that gives this space its cultural cache.

The layered story of this great stadium is tantalisingly close, but it is somehow rendered inert by the distorted, reimagined form of this once grand old ground.

I can’t even photograph the scene around me it in a way that evokes the Highbury of my imagination.

In previous writing on visits to former football grounds, I’ve referenced Tim Edensor’s work on ruins. For Edensor, ruins are spaces that are rife with transgressive possibilities, unregulated spaces which subvert our expectations.²

But what strikes me about Highbury is exactly the opposite. The new apartment complex is so regulated – all wire fence and glass partition.

I sit down in the approximate location of the centre-circle and lie on the grass as the sun strains to make itself known through the grey cloud.

As I lie prostrate on the turf, it gradually dawns on me that though I’ve nominally come to play and explore inside a footballing shipwreck – Highbury is no ruin.

This swanky new apartment complex offers no space for the discerning football fan to engage in a game of creative memory. It is inaccessible and unrecognisable. It offers only stylised, frozen images of the living culture this space once housed. It has been morphed and distorted into something new.

I slip out of the garden, out through the West Stand gate and wander back down the road towards the station. I reflect on a strange experience.

I have always placed Highbury on a pedestal. The very mention of the name conjures images of the Highbury Clock towering over a packed terrace, Albion’s historic travails in cup semi-finals, and the mesmeric football of Wenger, Henry and the Invincibles that I gorged on as a child.

But as I left Highbury, I felt imaginatively unfulfilled, somehow nostalgically impotent.

Beyond the highly stylised magic of the East Stand façade, this is a space that is incomprehensible. It’s dissonant and disquieting, somehow more legible to a patron of the Chelsea Flower Show than a Clock End punter.

Highbury feels cut off from its own heritage, its footballing past hermetically sealed behind towering walls of shimmering glass. It feels accessible only to the uber-rich homeowners, dotted around in their terrace-top lairs where we supporters once stood.

It is no longer a ruin of endless possibilities.

I look over my shoulder as I scan my phone. As I hear the barriers open in front of me, I can just see the top of the West Stand over the houses. I push on and skip down the stairs back towards the Piccadilly Line. A pint is calling my name at the Old Red Lion Theatre Pub.

I came today to get a taste of one of the greatest places in English football.

I suppose I feel like I’ve still not seen it.

Not really.

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All images used in this photo essay are property of the author. They were taken on a visit to Highbury, North London on June 6th, 2023.

1. Fermie, E. (2023) ‘Inside the former Premier League stadium converted into stunning flats worth almost half a BILLION pounds’. The Sun. Available at: https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/22236057/premier-league-arsenal-highbury-stadium-flats.

2. Edensor, T. (2005) Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality. New York: Berg, p. 5.