Highbury Stadium

Highbury shut its gates twice in its history. The ground opened on 6 September 1913 to a design by Archibald Leitch, and it might have stayed a functional bowl of terracing if not for the rebuild of 1932 to 1936, when Claude Ferrier and William Binnie raised the East and West Stands in art deco brick and glass.

The record crowd came on 9 March 1935, 73,295 packed in for a goalless draw with Sunderland, a number that belonged to an era of open terracing rather than to the stadium most fans of a certain age actually remember. The Taylor Report changed that. After Hillsborough, the North and Clock End terraces came down in 1992 and 1993, replaced by seats, and capacity fell from around 60,000 to 38,419. Plans to build the ground back up ran into local residents who blocked expansion through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, and UEFA's advertising requirements sometimes squeezed capacity further still, enough that Arsenal took Champions League nights to Wembley rather than play them at home. That mismatch between what the club needed and what the streets around Avenell Road and Drayton Park would allow is, in the end, why Highbury closed.

It played its last match on 7 May 2006 and was demolished soon after, but not completely. The East and West Stand fronts, both Grade II listed, were kept and built into a block of flats called Highbury Square, and the pitch itself became a communal garden at the centre of it, laid out roughly where the goalmouths used to stand.