EVERY day on the walk to work I pass an architect's office full of funky furniture and on the odd occasion I see architects, they're usually casually-attired and laughing. I've started to think they spend most of the day racing each other around the office on kiddies' trikes, just like the berks in Nathan Barley. Perversely, I imagine that when they actually get around to designing something, it's a bog-standard football stadium.
Contemporary stadium design annoys me intensely. I know football grounds aren't as important as the football played in them, but they matter to me. That's Hibs fans for you. We're fussily, prissily obsessed with the way things look. But show me a new
ground built in Scotland these past 20 years – or an old one redeveloped piecemeal and left unfinished – and I'll show you a pile of boringly-assembled breeze blocks where the colour of the plastic pop-up seats and maybe the odd banister represent the only concessions to individuality and, er, visual flourish.
The newest stadium in Scotland is New St Mirren Park. I haven't had the pleasure of visiting it yet so I may be being unkind, but the impression given by telly coverage of matches there is that it's come from more or less the same mould. It's a bit like Almondvale, maybe slightly bigger; similar to McDiarmid Park, only with fewer tractor bays in the car park.
My most prolonged exposure to New St Mirren Park was Hibs' recent match, screened live on Sultana TV. These days dug-outs are called technical areas, but at New St Mirren Park the old terminology seemed more apt. Gus McPherson and Mixu Paatelainen looked like they were standing at bus shelters, the drab kind you see on lonely country roads. They both looked pretty forlorn, as if they'd been waiting for ever. Maybe their best hope would have been to hitch rides on a tractor, though this was Paisley, not Perth. Were these brick outhouses New St Mirren Park's only distinguishing features? It seemed that way. Were they designed by a fully-qualified architect? If so, why in the name of the wee man is architecture a seven-year degree course?
I realise that our clubs don't have limitless funds for upgrading their homes or building new ones. I am aware, too, that a football stadium can only be designed so many ways. The scope for being clever or even just a bit different from other clubs is restricted by the requirement for four grandstands, two long, two short, preferably roofed and facing the pitch, although there may be some Motherwell fans who wish they didn't, in view of their club's scorched-earth policy towards the playing surface.
Surely, though, there is still room for imagination, idiosyncrasy and the quirks that all our grounds used to possess, courtesy of their Victorian origins. If these effects can't be achieved at the design stage then maybe they can be added later. After all, if pubs can buy their ambience from warehouses flogging stick-on history, easy-to-assemble character and grandfather clocks run on batteries, then maybe some sharp-suited wide-boy can open a similar emporium for oor fitba.
That's a joke; my concern about uninspiring stadium design is real. We all have to sit in the same coffee shops now, and gaze out on to standardised high streets with their identical branches of Carphone Warehouse and Clinton Cards. Football should be an escape from normality, and increasingly homogeneous normality; it shouldn't have to live in such dreary surroundings. Jings, the games themselves can be tedious enough without feeling like you've been sentenced to spend Saturday afternoons in some grim institution, situated out of town as more and more grounds are these days, so as not to scare small children and old ladies.
If you love your new abode, St Mirren fans, then please don't write in and complain. I don't mean to pick on your club and accept I have not yet experienced its dubious delights, something I will try to rectify next season. But these are grim times indeed for the stadium aesthete. Increasingly, the curved stand at Dens Park, the right-angled one at Tannadice, and especially the pavilion, pictured, at long-gone Broomfield – so house-like I used to think the Airdrie players lived there – look like the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
The full article contains 743 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
