One of the biggest transitions in Premier League history
encapsulated in one kit.
It does remind me of just sunny days at Highbury,
which for me were the best days ever.
I loved that place, I will always love that place,
the Emirates will never lay a glove on Highbury for me, ever.
To commemorate that long goodbye,
Arsenal departed from their usual kit design
to celebrate the foundations of the club,
and the story of this significant strip starts 108 years ago.
Stay with us.
Arsenal, the Gunners actually began life on the south side of the Thames
where the club was formed by munitions workers from the Royal Arsenal artillery.
During those early days money was tight,
so much so they didn't have team colours, let alone an actual kit.
So a number of their new signings
wrote home to their former employees at Nottingham Forest to ask for a favour
and they sent over a charitable donation of dark red shirts
a colour the club, soon to be known as Arsenal,
took north of the river to Highbury in 1913.
[Nottingham] Forest, as we know, play in bright kind of crimson red,
Forest were formed in the 1860s, during the Italian unification,
so the reason why they play in red is because of Garibaldi,
his followers were called the red shirts and they wore red shirts in battle
and red caps as well, so it's kind of a tribute to them.
So people think that Arsenal played in this kind of crimson red all the way since then.
However, some records show that Arsenal played in this kind of burgundy red
until the 1930s, so there's slightly a discrepancy there.
That was until Herbert Chapman came along in 1925.
The former Gunners boss decided to switch the club colours
to more pillar-box red with white sleeves,
to help the players stand out on the pitch.
I guess under Chapman the club won, I think, its first league and its first two FA Cup,
but he was really important as well in terms of the way the club did business.
He was really astute in the transfer market,
he kind of laid the foundations for the kind of modern Arsenal
to be the kind of rich, top, elite club that it is today.
As the years rolled on, development in kit design did not.
That was until the back end of the swinging 60s,
1967 to be exact, when the famous cannon arrived on the left hand side of the chest.
In '78, the Umbro double diamond appeared opposite the cannon,
a sign of a new commercial age for the club and football as a whole.
But then it was a time for change:
electronic giants JVC and Arsenal, began an 18-year partnership.
Things got a bit spicy between '86 and '94
when Adidas joined the party, bringing their iconic three stripes to North London,
churning out some of the era's classic designs.
First Arsenal kit I had
was the blue lightning.
First ever Arsenal shirt was a hand me down,
from the final season at Highbury, from my brother.
It was extremely baggy, oversized, is battered and tattered.
See, back in the day,
when we used to have like a kit for two seasons, three seasons,
that was the one, yeah?
You know like how a new phone comes out every year,
that's what football kits are now,
but they come out every month!
With the commercial and financial strength of the Premier League
entering new stratospheres every day,
Arsenal were held back by their inability to expand Highbury.
Beautiful home though it was,
the fact that it sat in the middle of a close residential area
and the East Stand being designated a grade two listed building,
meant the Gunners were gonna have to leave the place Martin Tyler once called:
“The stylish but small stately home of English football.”
What was the feeling like going into that season,
knowing that it was going to be the last season at Highbury?
Did the tone feel different to how it normally did?
Absolutely, every time you went into the ground,
on top of the big screen,
it had a countdown from the first game of the season.
It was sad, it was emotional, it absolutely was,
I mean I loved that place, I will always love that place.
The Emirates will never lay a glove on Highbury for me, ever.
I think everyone who worked in the stadium
was just trying to savour every match day,
You know, Arsenal was top of the tree, the Invincibles,
and then suddenly they were starting this new season,
the final season at their glorious, famous old ground,
with a lot of kids, you have Van Persie coming into the team
you have Fabregas who has now replaced Patrick Vieira as the midfield lynchpin,
despite still being a teenager.
A changing of the guard type feel.
On the last game it goes so quickly
that you can't really enjoy it, you know,
it's gone within a blink of an eye and then, it's weird,
it's only really afterwards, a couple of weeks after when you realise you're not going back
because that was obviously the end of the season.
It was the place where I had the best moments of my life,
some of the best moments of my life, don't tell my wife that I said that.
And knowing you weren't going to be there anymore and sit in that seat anymore,
it was a really strange and sad feeling.
So how to mark such a moment in the club's history?
Paying respect to their origins
by developing a one-off departure from their usual design,
throwing back to that first delivery of Forest kits in 1913.
My favourite one is the burgundy one.
Burgundy, I've got a thing for it.
I like the gold, I'm a gold merchant.
They're delicious, burgundy and gold.
The gold added that little of bit of je ne sais quoi.
It's obviously, I think, become a cult classic.
The players that have played in that kit, like:
Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp... that kit for me means a lot.
I don't think it was massively widely received back then
and I think it's become synonymous with the last season at Highbury.
Is there a player that you think of when you first see the shirt?
There is Thierry Henry, 100%.
Really weirdly I think about Patrick Vieira in that shirt.
It's strange because he never wore it, apart from in those photoshoots he did at Highbury,
because he was sold about 10 days later, I think.
That was shot in possibly February or March the season before,
so at the time, we had no idea that Patrick was leaving.
I thought it was a great kit.
We all knew the history behind it and I thought it looked really classy.
It does remind me of just sunny days at Highbury,
which for me were the best days ever.
But how did they know what colour the shirts were
if all the pictures were in black and white I hear you ask?
Well, the club commissioned this old photograph to be recoloured and restored.
Well, there was some controversy surrounding the hue of that kit,
the result was this subtle redcurrant assembly, finished with gold,
and a few subtle touches to honour the club's history.
The design of the shirt was incredibly simple,
but having the gold on the front I think really makes it a real sort of standout shirt.
The final game against Wigan...
How did you feel? Could you talk me through that day from your perspective?
Yeah, I remember from the moment I sat on the tube,
I remember it in the car on the way there.
Sitting on the tube and then getting up to Highbury.
After the kit man had set up the dressing room for the last time,
I went in there, I had like 10 minutes in there on my own just shooting the dressing room empty,
you know, for the last time...
I remember sitting there thinking: "this is it,
this is the last time I'm going to do this."
I've been doing that, the same sort of shots for years.
And so was then the penalty. Was that like the cherry on the icing on the cake?
It absolutely was!
The fact it was Henry, it was in front of the North Bank, it was his hat-trick...
He scored, he bowed down in front of the North Bank, he kissed the turf.
It was a great moment and you can see what it meant to Henry as well.
When he talks about it even now,
he talks about Highbury and what it meant to him and how special it was.
All these foreign players came in, they bought into it,
they understood what Highbury meant.
And no more so than Thierry Henry, absolutely, no one more than Thierry.
So, it meant a lot him scoring, sort of rounding things off like that.
It was a perfect ending.
Looking at things as they stand now,
do you feel that they have sort of found a feeling of comfort at the new stadium?
It's a difficult one, right?
Because obviously, these things take time,
and you can only start enjoying supporting the club when you start winning things
and Arsenal aren't quite there, right?
I would argue that things are moving in the right direction,
you've also got the kind of nice thing where
these young guys who have come through the club's youth system
know what it's like to play for the club, know what it's all about.
On the plus side it's listed, the East and the West Stand are listed.
I walk past it virtually every day and you can walk back into the marble halls.
So there is something that's left for us
and it's still a magical place to walk past and to walk into.
How does that feel?
I love it, and I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old child now
and we we sort of bunk in there on a Sunday or Wednesday
and run around on what was the old pitch, he's got a ball and stuff like that.
It's so quiet and it's all apartments around the outside,
the gardens are very quiet in the middle
and I try to sort of work out where I am on the pitch:
"I took this picture there, Thierry scored from here..."
And it does still feel wonderful to go back
and to actually have such incredible memories
and part of the stadium to actually be standing.