ABSTRACT
On 12 May 2006 the Gunners, as the world famous London football club Arsenal is often nicknamed, played their last home game at Highbury Stadium, a venue steeped in tradition. The name Gunners stems from the site on which the club was founded, the former Royal Arsenal munitions factory in the London suburb of Woolwich near the Thames, which in the nineteenth century was one of England’s most important armaments production facilities. Its riverside location led to the Royal Arsenal becoming the most important military supply centre for the expansion of the British Empire. The factory workers’ football team, which was founded in 1886 at the height of the expansion of the Royal Arsenal into Europe’s largest military industrial complex, represented an extension of military rivalry into civilian rituals of competition and domination. Initially playing on a piece of open ground on the Isle of Dogs, which some described as a ditch or open sewer, the football club moved from one nearby site to another until finding a long-term base for its activities in North London. Highbury Stadium, the home of the Gunners from 1913 to 2006, grew up around a playing field situated between gardens and backyards and was integrated seamlessly into the small-scale contours of a Victorian residential neighbourhood where on match, days kiosks takeaways and souvenir stands were unceremoniously set up in front gardens and driveways. Every home game at the ‘Home of Football’ thus constituted an extravagant staging of the homeland: an opulent theatre of British culture that spilled out from the stadium into the neighbourhood and was perpetuated in numerous myths and legends.
