Grounds for Divorce: How are London’s clubs managing to move stadium en masse in our crowded capital?

By Tom Simmonds

Of the 14 London clubs in England’s top five divisions, five have moved grounds in the last 30 years.  West Ham and Brentford will be on the move soon. Spurs are poised to undertake large-scale redevelopment work on White Hart Lane. Most London clubs who have stayed put have talked extensively about moving. In a city with huge pressures on space, how are they managing to up sticks?

When Millwall moved to London’s first ‘new’ football ground back in August 1993, it opened amid a hail of bluster from then Chairman Reg Burr. Burr made grandiose claims that major brands (and a pie and mash shop) would buy retail units within it, and that the ground would host many non-football events.

While Burr undoubtedly saw the way football was heading, his botched execution of the plan served only to cost us the services of Chris Armstrong, Colin Cooper et al to plug revenue gaps that only Burr’s promises were filling. What ‘The New London Stadium’, to give it its launch name, did was become an example of what not to do for other clubs with plans to move.

A trend (and this is one thing Burr did get right) in relocation can be seen in clever site selection. Millwall built on a piece of unloved wasteland at Senegal Fields, just over the road from the old Den, thus keeping them in Bermondsey. The Olympic Stadium in Stratford, which West Ham have elbowed their way to “anchor tenancy” of from 2016 at neighbouring Orient’s expense, was also built on such a piece of land. 

Arsenal followed the same rationale with their selection of Ashburton Grove near Highbury to build the Emirates on. The site was a piece of land in expensive Islington, squashed between two major railway lines. Even in today’s London, property developers would have thought hard about touching it. QPR’s desire to ride on Crossrail’s coat-tails and move to a brownfield site at Old Oak Common also has this thinking at its heart.

While ‘regenerating’ neglected areas is often at the centre of clubs’ rhetoric for building new stadia, it would be wrong to see this as solely a socially inclusive gesture on their part. The clubs say this with straight faces alongside their real driver – they want to make more money by attracting a fan base with deeper pockets that they can keep captive.

The incumbents of land that football clubs seek to claim often don’t see these plans as a good thing. QPR are currently at loggerheads with a car dealership who own large parts of the Old Oak site. The dealership has rejected QPR’s plans for a compulsory purchase order (CPO) of their land. Spurs’ plans are currently held up by a dispute over a CPO with a sheet metal business near White Hart Lane. Outside London, Liverpool have met opposition from residents around Anfield, who have accused the club of accelerating the area’s decline by buying houses behind the main stand and leaving them boarded up.

It’s in these stories where you see the nub of why football clubs in congested cities tend to get their own way with development plans, and it reflects the changing face of football, as well as the game’s pervasiveness throughout society.

The displacement of traditional businesses and long term residents in favour of building consumerist temples as addendums to stadia, such as the Olympic Park’s Westfield complex, is another symptom of football now being seen as a glamorous ‘product’, key to driving the national exchequer, rather than a local economy.

Just as working class supporters are now lesser-spotted species at some grounds, the surrounds of a lot of new stadia are divorced from the industrial roots of the clubs. Out with sheet metal factories, in with homogenous shops, bars and restaurants you can find anywhere. This might be more lucrative for the clubs, but it sticks in the throat when these same clubs attempt, as they do, to monetise the very history that projects like these aim to whitewash.

Do you support a club who has moved ground? How do you think it has affected them, on and off the pitch? Do you think stadiums should be used as community assets more than they currently are?

Read more from Tom Simmonds here.

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