Pete Collard

Pete Collard is exhibitions curator at the RIBA; and the brains behind a new show held at RIBA North in Liverpool called Home Ground, the Architecture of Football. Tim spoke to him about an architectural typology that was developed in the home of football but increasingly found its apogee away in Europe.

 

Podcast transcript

 

Pete Collard: My name is Pete Collard. I’m an exhibitions curator at the RIBA. So we’ve curated a new exhibition called Home Ground, the Architecture of Football at our RIBA North Outpost in Liverpool. So the reason we’re doing the show is because of the new Everton Stadium, the Hill Dickinson, which has just opened this August. And it felt like a very timely moment to reflect on the future of football stadiums, but also to think at the history as well, because Everton is leaving a very old and very much loved stadium. Goodson Park offered a window into the past as well. 

Tim Abrahams: Where do you start the story and why? 

Pete Collard: It begins in Britain because football is a British game, originally. Therefore, it is natural that the history of football stadium architecture does begin here. We set the groundwork which  was then adopted in other countries around Europe, South America, and so on. The original principle in Britain certainly was to find a bit of land, put a fence around it and, depending on your budget, build a grandstand from timber and raise up a bit of earth around the edges to make some very rudimentary terracing. The game was emerging. It wasn’t the multi-billion dollar industry that it is today. Clubs were a bit shoestring. They didn’t have a lot of money and this was a cheap way of doing it. We did pioneer football stadium architecture because the game grew in popularity and therefore this was the place that football stadiums developed in style and in scale.

The exhibition actually begins with some wonderful black and white film footage. We are very kindly showing the British Film Institute’s black and white film footage from the turn of the century As you can imagine, filmmaking is an emerging art form as well. So the footage is very shaky. It’s very basic. The films aren’t very long. It’s notable that they cut out after about a minute because that was the amount of film they had. So you don’t get the full match, but you get a good insight into not only the grounds, but the crowds and also the quality of the football, which I have to say is not very good.

So we’ve got three films there. First one shows Liverpool versus Small Heath in 1901 this is Anfield as was in the first sort of 10 years of its existence. Of course, Anfield is very interesting because originally it was evidence ground. Until the dispute over rent, I think it was 1893 meant that the club moved distance away to what is now Eson Park and meant that the ground owners had a stadium but no club which is how Liverpool came into being.

We’re also featuring Turf Moore. An early game from Burnley: very evocative. You can see, the chimneys and the factories in the background really typifies who the audience was at that time. And all the grounds are surrounded by terrace houses. You are in the heartlands of working for communities.

And this was a weekend pursuit. This was a point in British society when the working class started to have more leisure time and they had a bit more money to spend on weekend pursuits. At Burnden Park we have some film footage as well, which is noticeable for the presence of a cycling track around the outside of the ground.

 There wasn’t a huge amount of money and the game was in its infancy, and therefore the ground owners would often build something else as a facility within the stadium so that other sports could take place when football wasn’t being played. This is actually an interesting throw forward to the modern era, and this is quite nice, the way that as the exhibition goes on, this is something people are returning to with the idea that not just football is played in the modern stadium.

Tim Abrahams: We’re beginning to see this singular. Concept of a stadium, which is, at the heart of a community and used very rarely. And what that means in terms of its scale and its significance 

Pete Collard: In most cases, the land was cheap. Sometimes it was a former brick works or, it was just a bit of land that no one else had wanted to build on for housing. Scrap land, which meant often it was an irregular shape fitted in perhaps next to a railway track. In this film from Bolton, you actually see that the ground is at the bottom of an embankment. And a train actually goes past at one moment. So the stands and the terraces were built in a disproportionate scale based on the amount of land that was available. And if you think about football stadiums as they grew during the 20th century, often clubs were really tightly hemmed in by the restrictions of existing infrastructure. That had been there for many years. With foresight, the clubs would’ve moved earlier to a bigger site. But of course they didn’t. 

Tim Abrahams: When does architecture begin to happen? Is Archibald Leitch that moment? 

Pete Collard: Archibald Leitch is definitely that moment. He started working in Scotland in the late 1890s. And then England in the early 1900s including Anfield. We have a lovely drawing, which we are very kindly borrowing from the club itself which shows a very basic ground with the plans for the stadium.

Leitch’s work in this moment, which is in 1906, was to construct the Kop. The famous terrace, perhaps the most famous terrace in world football. And he also built the new grandstand. So even in 1906, you’re starting to see the scale of football. The game is growing in popularity and therefore the clubs have cottoned onto this and they’re trying to build as quickly and as cheaply as they can.

Archibald Leitch, worked for over 40 clubs during his career. So he was very prolific and he did pioneer the slightly basic idea, I think, of putting four stands around a pitch, very boxy with not much decoration or ornamentation apart from his trademark lattice steel crosswork across the upper tier of the stand. But it was always very functional. There wasn’t really a lot of comfort, cheap materials.

Notice also, like the restrictions of the terraces around. Of course, if you go to Anfield now, you won’t see this row of houses. In fact, I think that both of those terraces have since been knocked down as the ground has expanded. 

Tim Abrahams: Although the street grid still remains, 

Pete Collard: yeah, they’re still in the same footprint, but in order to enlarge the stadium some people have had to move out 

Tim Abrahams: a good sacrifice. You’ll never walk alone. It’s quite surprising that Leitch made such a success given the fact that there was a particular moment in his career when one of the stands that he’d built in Glasgow was involved in, well, a disaster really. I suppose it was. How did that influence his career?

Pete Collard: It is interesting that happened and he was able to salvage his career through going back, literally going back to the drawing board and rethinking how he designed stadiums. It was at Ibrox Park that a section of terracing gave way, it was built out of timber. The inquest and the investigations afterwards suggested that the constructor had not used the specified timber and the arrangement of the joints and so on was not as Leitch had designed.

Leitch, who was actually a Rangers fan, was distraught and obviously helped to try and understand what had gone wrong and managed to resurrect his career from it. The single biggest thing that he did from that moment was use earth as a building material rather than constructing quite heavily engineered terracing that required a lot of timber, a lot of materials. And of course it had to be safe and built according to the correct regulations and so on. 

Tim Abrahams: So when you say earth, it was to effectively build embankments?

Pete Collard: Literally that he would, as the drawing of the Kop will show, he literally piled up mounds of earth as a very secure way of raising the sight lines of all the people watching.

It’s an artificial hill effectively, which is where the nickname of the Kop actually comes from. The fact that it looked. Like a hill. Effectively. It was a hill with I think around 130 steps going up. It reminded a lot of the troops coming back from the Boer War of the Spion Kop, which is where there was a famous battle during the Boer war. But it was a technique that he went on to use at many other grounds around Scotland and England. There’s Chelsea football club. 

Tim Abrahams: That’s Stamford bridge looking, dare one say it, much nicer than it does today.

Pete Collard: It does look good, doesn’t it?

Tim Abrahams: It looks really good. It’s a very open stadium and there’s only one shed really for the entrance, whereas it’s a bowl of embankment. 

Pete Collard: I love this image because when you first look at it, you can see the people on these front terrace and people going up the steps. It’s a very long exposure. So it’s a little bit blurred, but then you realize that to the left, all of that is a sea of people. You don’t quite understand the scale of the crowd that is there. It’s very evocative. 

Tim Abrahams: 60, 000?

Pete Collard: it’s between 70 and 80.

Tim Abrahams: Wow.

Pete Collard: Attendances are estimated in those days. Stamford Bridge was also built in a slight oval because it also had a cycle track around the outside and again, it’s quite tight in on the railway line there.

Tim Abrahams: Is it all terracing as well? 

Pete Collard: That is all terracing. But the grandstand had some seating and it was covered too. 

Tim Abrahams: Keep the rain off the money, 

Pete Collard: Off the genteel supporters. 

Tim Abrahams: So at what stage do things move on from the condition that Leitch creates? And where does that happen?

Pete Collard: It happened very slowly. And of course this actually is the underlying story really, of British football stadium architecture that many grounds were built. Various improvements were made over the years, but there reached a point when nothing changed. And this is something we cover later on in the exhibition,

but as I said, Leitch was the go-to guy. Throughout his career, he did start to get a bit more elaborate and a bit more decorative. A bit more thoughtful, really, in his architecture, working with the clubs to create some quite stylish grounds by the end, so Goodison Park he worked on for around 20 years.

He built three stands, within that period, and it became the first ground in Britain to have terracing at the bottom and seating above. And at the time that was Goodison Park in 1937 was the state-of-the-art stadium. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s not something that I’ve said. Throughout the 1980s or 1990s but that’s a really good looking stadium. It didn’t change very. 

Pete Collard: No, and that’s the issue. It didn’t change at all. They made some changes at one point this terrace here at the back that was destroyed, that terrace originally actually is where lot the players used to live when they first moved to the club from. From wherever they’d come from.

Tim Abrahams: That’s living a bit too close to work, isn’t it?

Pete Collard: So you see the issue with Goodison in there that it’s completely landlocked by all the terraces. We mentioned Rangers Leitch worked for the club on a number of years,

Tim Abrahams: so he went back to Rangers.

Pete Collard: He did go back to Rangers. He did lots more work for them. And this I think, and Villa Park are perhaps the two jewels of his architecture. Villa Park, I have to say, almost criminally, has been knocked down: the Holte End and the other stands, but the brick work that he used here at Ibrox is a lot more expressive, a lot more decorative. And quite an imposing site. I do believe there’s a nickname. 

Tim Abrahams: I don’t wanna get in trouble. It was referred to by a TV weather lady as Castle Greyskull on a broadcast for which she was reprimanded. I think everyone found a sense of humor and let her off, but she was sworn never to use that term again. But it is a beautiful and imposing building. That was from the view from Edmondson Drive. So when Leitch, and you’re suggesting that’s perhaps his masterpiece, the extant masterpiece as it were?

Pete Collard: On the pitch side. It has his trademark lattice, crisscross motif across the upper part of the stand. And yeah, the back he used brickwork in a way, which was, I think for the time, that would’ve been quite a statement.

Football stadiums were considered functional, quite practical, quite basic structures. The idea was, get people in, get people out, get ’em to pay money at the turnstile, and, not who cares what it looks like, but why are you spending money on this? But I think here and certainly at Villa Park as well, clubs have started to realize that there is a prestige, there is a certain ideal stadium that you want to aspire to because it makes your club feel Yeah. Bigger, better, even if you’re not doing someone on the pitch  permanent as well, very permanent. 

Tim Abrahams: I suppose the, so other materials, you say brick is important, so previously it’s wood and steel.

Pete Collard: Yeah. These stands you see here at Goodison. There are some photographs of the demolition of one of those stands. And it is surprising how thinly built it seemed to be. It’s wooden terrace work built on a steel structure, on a steel frame.

Tim Abrahams: That’s something that you couldn’t accuse the stand at Ibrox of being

Pete Collard: No,

Tim Abrahams: It’s very imposing. 

Pete Collard: Exactly. And that also shows the evolution of his style. But I think more than anything else, it shows the evolution of football and the budgets that clubs had to work with. 

Tim Abrahams: And this is Wembley.

So beginning to look at very much co-opting an architecture of permanence, of durability,

Pete Collard: We wanted to show Wembley because obviously it became a very iconic stadium for football throughout the 20th century. And in particular the first fa cup final 1923 was a remarkable event due to the. Volumes of people that turned up there for capacity of around a hundred thousand. I think around double that turned up, stormed the gates and spread all over the pitch, delaying the kickoff.

Quite famously they had to get some police horses out to slowly push the crowd back, and remarkably the game was played. This is a small section within the show and we just wanted to present how certain football stadiums have this iconic status that would be used in promotional materials.

That going to the match is as much about going to the stadium as it is to watch the game of football. 

Tim Abrahams: So it’s about arrival at a place? 

Pete Collard: Absolutely. You are part of a big event and the architecture is playing a really important part in creating the atmosphere. 

Tim Abrahams: Interesting. We have stepped outside the bounds of the United Kingdom here. This is a beautiful drawing and a different architectural language perhaps. What’s this 

Pete Collard: So that’s like the British story. And we wanted to acknowledge that at the same time across, in mainland Europe quite a different story was emerging: the clubs were evolving perhaps 10 or 20 years after.

Those of England and Scotland and the clubs were a bit more receptive to different architectural ideas, again, in promoting the vision of both the club, the city in a way that architecture is often used to represent the zeitgeist of the time. So here in Holland, this is the Feyenoord stadium, a beautiful piece using very modern materials. In Rotterdam around this time there’s a number of buildings and factories, the Van Elli factory, by the same architect Johannes Brinkman is a very classic example of of modernity

Tim Abrahams: It’s a really interesting juxtaposition ’cause that’s 1934 and what is an architectural language of light steel frames.

Pete Collard: It’s a steel frame. And effectively the top of the upper tier were suspended above the lower ones. So the idea was that in Leitch’s architecture back in good old Blighty you had columns and you had pillars which had to support the upper terraces, which at Goodes and Park you still had in 2025. Whereas this was the future of stadiums was something that was much more designed around the spectator, around sight lines.

Can I actually see the goal that’s being scored or have I gotta lean around to catch a glimpses? But it’s an incredible structure. And yeah, as you can see, it’s literally built outside of the city center. And a new part of town the opening game was delayed because the city hadn’t actually built the tram lines to the stadium where they promised they would, and the stadium was ready, but the city hadn’t got its act together.

Tim Abrahams: I still love the idea that the Hill Dickinson, there’s about 20 people who suddenly have seats where they don’t have to lean to their right to actually see the actual game. Sorry, Everton fans, you were known for the columns. And this, where’s this? This is amazing. Oh, wow. That’s a beautiful book. 

Pete Collard: This is the Camp Nou. We couldn’t really do an exhibition at football stadiums without going to Barcelona. This is a beautiful perspective sketch of the stadium. As originally designed.

It has of course undergone various redevelopments and is in the middle of one as we speak. Here the architecture is very symbolic of the city. It’s important to think about what is happening in Spain at this moment that the club and the architects were looking to the international architecture scene to create something which could be representative of Catalan culture and identity and of course the club became a place where politics and all kinds of things could be discussed within the forum 

Tim Abrahams: What year is this? 

Pete Collard: This is the mid 1950s,

Tim Abrahams: So you can see it in the architectural language, that kind of tight modernism, but repeated bays, the arches, which give it a kind of squint and you can see the classical influence. It’s a… it’s an incredible structure. 

Pete Collard: It’s like a rejection of Spanish architecture. It’s a rejection of anything that could be thought to be representative or connected with General Franco. So it became something that was unique to Barcelona. The positioning of it in the center of town was also very carefully chosen and symbolic in itself and it helped generate this idea that Barcelona is more than a club. Yeah, it is representative of people 

Tim Abrahams: It’s really interesting that just as the game very quickly became someone else’s, the architecture of the stadiums became something else. It moved forward. you go from these charming, intensely located structures, which still gives a lot of the international appeal of the game.

Pete Collard: Absolutely.

Tim Abrahams: The fact that you capture the expression of the fans, because they’re so cramped in pretty much but you look at the architects that’s happening oh wow,

Pete Collard: So the next two stadiums I’m gonna talk about are very political in two different countries, one in Italy and one in Austria. Again, they are a demonstration of the meaning of spectacle; the power of communal gatherings.

Italy, 1930s. This is under Mussolini. The authorities in Florence wanted to have something which was representative of Mussolini’s interest, the Fascist interest in sport, in health and having public displays of masculine virility entine and not doing that right now, but the club moved into this municipal stadium built by the city.

But the architecture is very bold. It’s very concrete because it’s Nervi. It’s a very early project by Nervi, but it’s quite monumental. It’s the idea that you come in and you feel small, but you’re part of something bigger and you are surrounded by people. 

Tim Abrahams: But in many ways, this is with the use of concrete. Pretty much we are moving into the beginning of what we might identify as a modern stadium design.

Pete Collard: We are, but the contrast between, let’s say this stadium in Florence named after a local fascist fighter who was killed a few years earlier.

Tim Abrahams: It’s not called that now,

Pete Collard: Who could have thought? The National stadium in Austria, which was built by the socialist authorities. And if you look at the interior, it has no hierarchy. There is no VIP box. There is no grandstand. Everyone sits where they sit. So it was built on the principles and it’s built as part of this larger sports ground area. Again, it’s about health and sporting activity participation, but with entirely the opposite political argument behind it. And it’s more sort of Bauhaus-esque. It’s got concrete, but it is also using steel and glass in a more informal, but still quite formal way. 

Tim Abrahams: Facade all the way round Is a glass. 

Pete Collard: Yeah.

Tim Abrahams: Is it still standing?

Pete Collard: It’s been built on, there’s an extra tier of put on and then for the euros. Of 2012, 

Tim Abrahams: It was the one that England didn’t get through to, and everyone said it was amazing that was 2008 I think. 

Pete Collard: And as much as what is happening in Europe is to do with cities. Municipal governments the idea of a stadium being belonging to the people rather than belonging to the club. And therefore the city has an opportunity to say something quite bold with the architecture elsewhere around the world.

The World Cup, of course, started in the 1930s as well, and this is more about putting the host nation in the spotlight and creating something which is a manifestation of the nation as a whole. So in this section we are looking at is the early World Cups in South America and in Central America and Mexico.

Because of the scale of the stadiums that were built, they were simply bigger than anything else that had been built before and built for the World Cup. So the Centenario Stadium at Montevideo: a very evocative, bold stadium built in 1930 and in Mexico the Azteca Stadium, used for the World Cup but the Maracana was in many ways a counterpoint to the stadium of Montevideo. The rivalry between Brazil and Uruguay, which wasn’t just one pitch, was also who’s got the biggest stadium? Who’s got the best stadium? In Brazil, they tried to go one better than their neighbors and built the Maracana, but it wasn’t ready in time. They absolutely messed up the construction. So the opening ceremony, some of the early games were only, they could only use half of the stadium because it wasn’t ready for the final against their arch rivals. Uruguay, It still wasn’t quite ready, loads of people crammed in. As you can see from this image, people are still on the upper tier. And they stuffed it. They lost it. So a bit embarrassing 

Tim Abrahams: A bit of hubris. 

Pete Collard: They rushed it and because of that, they weren’t ready. We also talk about Italian 90 as a case study within World Cups because why not? Within the World Cup narrative, it was really the most incredible World Cup for architecture.

I think it was the first time that not just a new stadium for the final was built, but the host nation invested heavily in all the other stadiums, either building brand new ones, or renovating or rebuilding existing structures. A lot of other things were built to do with transport and so on.

And the effect was incredible. The centerpiece of the exhibition is this fantastic model of the San Siro, arguably the most iconic and recognizable football stadium in the world. Of course, I would say in some ways, quite tragically. Its days are numbered. But what a place to play football and to go and watch football.

Tim Abrahams: And that was built specifically

Pete Collard: So the stadium was already there – built in the 1930s. It was added to in the 1950s. And then for the 1990 World Cup, this huge third tier with the very recognizable steel girders going across the top and the spiraling staircases around the side was built.

So really it’s a very clever solution to a quite tricky problem, how do you expand or how do you build on a new stadium? You just build a whopping great big new thing that sits over the top of it, but to great effect, it looks beautiful, it looks monumental. When you arrive, you come out of the metro and you walk across, it takes your breath away.

It really does. Other noteworthy stadiums, of course the brilliant Stadio Luigi Ferraris in Genoa Vitoria Gregotti, a wonderful Italian architect. And this stadium. I think it’s very iconic, certainly to audiences in the UK because of the games that were played there.

Scotland played there, but didn’t do so well. And outside the UK the Republic of Ireland, of course, went through on penalties against Romania. A very famous shootout. But the iconic towers in the corner, it’s interesting that this stadium is quite British in its design. Rather than being a more oval shape that many clubs or many stadiums are built to around the continent this is a more boxy British approach ,

Tim Abrahams: Is there a reason for that?

Pete Collard: Why not? Gregotti just fancied it I think, and to great effect. You know it. People recognize it. People really show a picture of that stadium. People will know where it is. Renzo piano and his, I think very underrated and sadly underused at the moment. Stadio San Nicolo in Bari, a flying saucer that has landed in the plains outside of the city.

Beautiful petal concrete, upper tier. Quite clever. The way that he thought about segregation and keeping certain fans away from others, of course, is the 1990s. Football hooliganism was feared really for the Italian 90 tournament. But this is a very clever, refined solution and very elegant. The only issue is that you could argue that it was too big for the city and for the club, and is no longer used or it has not been maintained as well as you would hope.

But Italia 90 is also relevant for a lot of the other innovations that it introduced. Things like video screens hadn’t really been part of stadium infrastructure and the new stadiums that were built all had tv camera positions, galleries, commentary positions. Journalists could have their own spaces built into the stadium for the first time, understanding that the true audience really was on tv.

So you designed for the pitch, for the players, for the crowd, but you also design for the people at home. 

Tim Abrahams: It must be very difficult to arrive at a point where you can say where the stadium, the football stadium is now. ’cause there are so many different varieties of stadium now. 

Pete Collard: It used to be that you designed with the space you had and the budget that you had, but with clubs moving from the old sites from quite restricted locations, if you have a brand new site, such as when Huddersfield town, moved to the John Smith Stadium.

On the back of the Taylor Report it’s a blank canvas. So the Taylor report was commissioned in the wake of the Hillsborough tragedy of 1989. This is something we touch on in the exhibition. I think it’s important to acknowledge what went wrong in the 1980s.

And as I said at the beginning part of this was that grounds were built in 1910, 1920, and they simply weren’t updated, so you had very crumbling infrastructure. Whole sections were simply shut down. But if you look at the photographs of the era, you can see that things are falling apart. You know that these things aren’t safe.

The barriers are barely fixed into the concrete: added to sporadic issues with supporters lead to segregate fans who are often packed into very small, quite unsafe areas. Fencing was put around the terraces to stop fans from getting out. The attitudes of the police as well: judging all football supporters to be criminals regardless of intent. The minute you got off the train to go to a football stadium, you were viewed by the police as a potential criminal and treated as such, so quite dark days in the 1980s, which, tragically ended in Hillsborough, an entirely avoidable tragedy for which blame has finally started to be properly apportioned. In the wake of that, the Taylor report was written and the Taylor report specified that in the top two tiers of English football, that clubs had to have all seater stadia. For example, as we said, the Kop, one of the most famous stands in British football, had to become all seater, which was a great loss. I think there’s a great sense of community.

It’s a very important symbol I think of, again, as we talked about at the beginning of working class identity, a place to go to be with your fellow supporters. 

Tim Abrahams: And were the recommendations of the Taylor report, they were played out across the continent? 

Pete Collard: They were, I think the Taylor Report became a benchmark for stadium design around the world really. And even though it wasn’t legislated that clubs had to follow its lead, many other countries did follow that example. In Britain, the situation was basically that clubs either had to move because their ground was antiquated. It would cost more money to rebuild.

In many cases, they would just have to knock it down and rebuild it. You couldn’t adapt. And that left a very interesting opportunity for architects to think what is a football stadium? Why does a football stadium look like it does? It’s been designed like that because it has been without any particular rationale for the style.

So I think the John Smith stadium built by Populous in the mid 1990s really broke the mold. I think it’s a very pioneering piece of architecture. The idea that it didn’t need to be boxy. You have these sweeping steel arc trusses which suspend effectively the stand.

You think about Wembley Stadium, there’s lots of other stadiums around the world. There’s the Sydney Olympic Stadium of 2000 which follows this model as well. So this is like a different turning point

Tim Abrahams: Designed by Populous. So this was a trying out of the… yeah. And some great architecture, this one is perhaps my favorite stadium. This one, Herzog de Meuron the Stade de Bordeaux. 

Pete Collard: So from this point in the exhibition we showcase really what architects have done since that point in the nineties to really demonstrate that, yeah, football stadiums can look like anything you want it to really, there is no rationale for it being uniform and generic and yeah, I think the Bordeaux stadium is remarkable. 

Tim Abrahams: That’s a really lovely picture by Iwan Baan which captures the idea that you are, I’ve heard it referred to as like the narrow pillars are like the woods surrounding the stadium, but this picture by Baan really captures that by looking through the woods.

To the stadium. You get this idea that it’s, the city isn’t there anymore. It’s actually a relationship between the territory and the and the structure. 

Pete Collard: Exactly. I think if you’re approaching the stadium, you’re not sure what it is, and I think that’s the greatest compliment you can give it or any of the other stadiums in this section, is it’s not identifiable as a football stadium, whereas previously if you’re driving on the motorway or you are on train and you’re coming in, you’re like, oh, there’s a stadium, there’s a football stadium. Historically, you’d see the floodlights and obviously that gives the game away, but it looked like a football stadium, whereas 

Tim Abrahams: Is that a good thing?

Pete Collard: As a small boy, that was fantastic. You get really excited if you’re driving along the motor and your dad says look over there. And then you realize it’s, Bury Athletic or Walsall. No offense to Walsall.

Tim Abrahams: Other football clubs are available. 

Pete Collard: I did drive past that one a lot. But it’s exciting. That’s where football is played when you’re a kid. That’s it. 

Tim Abrahams: But what do you think now that there was a recognizable quality to a stadium? What do you think now that the architecture is so different?

Pete Collard: This is also by Herzog de Meuron. This is the Allianz Arena. It’s all about the facade now. I think that the big difference is that if you’re building as a single object almost and placing it within the landscape, how you approach the stadium, how you generate anticipation, which is such an important part of a football match, is not just sitting in your seat and watching the game. It’s that people are coming together. They’re getting excited for the match. You want people to participate and do that, not just in the stadium, but outside as well. 

Tim Abrahams: Oh, the Braga Stadium For the 2004 Portuguese European Championship. is just incredible. Just when you think you’ve seen it all . . Beautiful. It looks like a quarry. 

Pete Collard: It is a quarry. This is one of those ones that when people saw it on tv, they didn’t understand what was going on. And quite rightly because behind one of the goals is a quarry, it’s like a cliff face effectively. And that’s quite a radical concept. ’cause usually by the goal you have fans.

That’s rule one of football stadiums: put fans behind the goal. So it’s a very radical concept, but it is beautiful. It’s so elegant, it’s monumental. It was trying to reuse some land which was outside the city center, but engaging in a way that creates a beautiful structure. Obviously he’s a genius architect and this is, I think one of his favorite projects using concrete in a way, which is brutalist and monumental, but at the same time it’s very elegant.

It’s a very light looking structure, and yeah, it’s engagement with the landscape in the same way that the other, the previous two by Herzog de Meuron, again, it’s thinking about the position of the stadium within its surroundings, which is something architects were never able to do before. They had to respond to what is there and on that note, for example, Tottenham Hotspur, their new stadium is built on the site of White Hart Lane. They chose to stay on the Tottenham High Road. They are think the only one of the only football clubs to have, high Street going outside their ground. But it’s incredibly tight. It is surrounded.

It is still a very tight residential area. But it’s a huge new modern structure. 

Tim Abrahams: In interior terms, it really is a game changer actually. I went and saw it during the Europa League run and that was actually an incredible experience. I was gonna say, should we talk about the next one? But it’s Real Madrid, so we won’t. Just, just by way of, just by way of wrapping up , which stadium are you looking forward to? Which stadium do you think is gonna take things forward? That is on the drawing board. 

Pete Collard: That’s on the drawing board right now.

It’s hard to say really out of all the, I mean, Zaha Hadid has a very interesting all timber structure for Forest Green Rovers, which is part of the club’s sustainability ethos and goals. The owner also owns the Ecotricity company.

He’s a real pioneer for Net Zero. And so the architects have responded and built what would be the first all timber stadium in the world, which is a remarkable thing when you think about it, but it’s also very beautiful. I think it has a graceful design that will sit well within the landscape.

And it’s also a bit of a statement piece about who the club is and what it represents and where the club is going. One of the most interesting things about the future is the Hill Dickinson Stadium itself. What that will mean for the surrounding area of Liverpool, a bit of a reverse to how the early stadiums were built in quite tight or dense residential areas. Hill Dickinson stadium’s being built in a very underused part of the city. The idea, and I think the end result will be a lot of investment in and around the stadium to repopulate, rebuild. New housing, new commercial areas and so on.

So a slight reversal of the original ideas. The other sort of movement to acknowledge is the women’s game and the huge growth of women’s football helped, by the recent successes of the England team in the Euros. There’s currently one stadium.

In America it’s played in Kansas City. The current women’s team play there. It’s the first professional women’s stadium built purposely for a women’s professional sports team, let alone football. And I think that is a precedent that we’ll see more often. I know Brighton and Hove Albion are in discussions and developing a similar proposal.

You might think why do you need a women’s stadium as opposed to a men’s stadium? The audience and the spectators for women’s football are very different. It’s a much more family orientated experience on a very sort of physical level. The sight lines, the seats, everything that you build around what is predominantly in a male audience that doesn’t work if you’ve got little kids, if you’ve got a family group and so on. So subtle changes like that to the seating and how people engage, crush, facilities, baby, baby feeding. All kinds of things need to be integrated into there and I think it’s wonderful. I think that’s a really exciting part of the game and how it grows.

Tim Abrahams: Peter, this has been amazing. I wish we could spend more time. Tell me how long the exhibition’s on for and where it’s on and how people can go and see it. 

Pete Collard: So the exhibition is on at RIBA North which is on Mann Island at the waterfront Liverpool. RIBA North is currently sharing its space with Tate Liverpool. And we are on until the end of January.

Tim Abrahams: Fantastic. Get there if you can get tickets to Hill Dickinson, which is pretty hard to do. Not quite as hard as Anfield, but go there, go and see it. Thank you very much, Pete. Bye.

 

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