White Hart Lane

1899-2017

By ADAM POWLEY

Archibald Leitch’s architectural vision ensured the atmosphere at Tottenham’s former home crackled on their biggest nights

By ADAM POWLEY

As a means to describe White Hart Lane (WHL), the old Park Lane stand is apt. Its rear wall ran conventionally straight west to east along the street from which it derived its name, before taking a strange diagonal shift to the south-east. It embodied the stadium, and perhaps the club it hosted for 118 years: an idiosyncratic mix of delightful features and structures, some awkward joins, and a whole that only occasionally felt the sum of its parts.

But what a ground. On a good day, with the sun beaming on the packed East Stand and Tottenham Hotspur dazzling on the pitch, there were few places in English football more thrilling to be. On a bad day, as during the mid-1980s collapse in attendances, the skeletal spaces on the end terraces offered a worrying symbol of decline. But life here was never boring.

The favoured origin story is that the club was formed in 1882 by a group of schoolboys meeting under a gas lamppost on the High Road just yards from where WHL would emerge. The teenagers wanted a winter sporting alternative to their existing “Hotspur” cricket club. The name arose in honour of Sir Henry Percy or “Harry Hotspur”, the medieval ancestor of local landowners the Dukes of Northumberland. So began an unbroken link between the area and the club. After initially playing on Tottenham Marshes and then Northumberland Park, Spurs settled on a site behind the White Hart pub in 1899. The functional 25,000-capacity stadium needed a name. Various “Parks” were proposed – Gilpin, Percy, Rowel – drawing on local associations: a rowel is a part of the spur a mounted knight such as Hotspur would wear. None were adopted and the “Hotspur” or “Spurs Ground” sufficed until White Hart Lane became the default name, albeit never officially. So why did WHL stick? The likely reason is that the original correspondence address for the club was the home of one of the founders, Bobby Buckle, who lived at White Cottage on nearby White Hart Lane itself.

Thanks to the 1901 FA Cup win while still a non-League club, Spurs emerged as the pre-eminent team in the south, and the stadium expanded with extended end terraces. More significant change came with the contracting of Archibald Leitch, the architect who did so much to shape the stadiums of pre-war British football.

Leitch transformed the ground. First came the West Stand in 1909, the largest then built in British football. It soon gained the famous rooftop cockerel-and- ball statue designed by former player WJ Scott. Incremental improvements raised capacity to 55,000 with 80 per cent of the stands and extensive seating under cover. But the most impressive addition came with perhaps Leitch’s finest design. Unveiled in 1934, the new East Stand was, as Simon Inglis put it, “a wedding cake” – painted white with blue detailing, three tiers, and seating for just under 5,000 above a double-decked terrace accommodating 18,000.

At £60,000, it cost a fortune and raised capacity to 80,000 in a period when the team yo-yoed between Divisions One and Two. The club had taken a risk, but it proved its value over the decades. The real gain was the Shelf. This was the elevated middle tier of terracing – strictly speaking the section at the southern end, next to a smaller triangular area dubbed the “Cage” – that provided arguably the best standing view in the country and home for Tottenham’s hardcore support.

Standing on the Shelf was a rite of passage. It was not an “end” as such (the Park Lane stand fulfilled that duty) but was the beating heart of the ground. On European nights especially, under the floodlights and Spurs in all-white, the Shelf was at its finest: loud, raucous, often edgy but always captivating. During the early 1960s heyday, so deafening was the din that a local vicar complained.

On European nights especially, under the floodlights and Spurs in all-white, the Shelf was at its finest: loud, raucous, often edgy but always captivating

Many say the Shelf’s finest hour came in the 1984 UEFA Cup final penalty shootout against Anderlecht. Popular full-back Danny Thomas had the chance to win it but his spot-kick was saved. The packed crowd howled in angst, before the Shelfsiders started a chant of “One Danny Thomas”, soon picked up by the whole ground.

It wasn’t always so kind-hearted. Former players often grumbled about how the crowd could turn and scapegoat, and WHL had its fair share of hooligans. But during the 1970s, the far-right terrace recruiters were usually given short shrift, thanks in part to a fanbase that had always been relatively diverse – a blend of the “ribald and the rich”, as John Motson once put it.

Characters abounded: touts, geezers, rogues, celebrities, and a sprinkling of the wealthy made WHL a place to watch people as well as football. But much of that charm waned as the ground was clumsily modernised, first in 1982 with a cantilevered and executive-boxed West Stand that nearly bankrupted the club, then a botched and controversial conversion of the East Stand that put Spurs into similar hock, before the completion of the Park Lane and Paxton Road ends that fulfilled the all-seater strictures of the Taylor Report but dulled the overall visuals and experience.

Come the modern era and in the absence of an oligarch or petrostate ownership, the club needed to turbo-boost revenues. So in 2016 the builders moved in to construct a spanking new ground. It’s a fantastic arena, and in some aspects respects the past: a plaque marks the location of the old centre-circle spot; the concourse floors are made with reconstituted rubble of the old East Stand. But it’s not the old WHL, and with its demise some of the spirit of Spurs has been mournfully lost.