If you’ve watched British football at any point in the last century, you’ve seen the
designs and engineering of a Scot named Archibald Leitch.
At the turn of the 20th century, the sport was only just becoming a social and cultural
phenomenon, and as the appetite for the game grew, and the working and middle classes had
the disposable income for ‘leisure’ activities, football chiefs became obsessed with the task
of cramming as many fans into their grounds as possible.
The man appointed to design the vast majority of these new grounds was Archibald Leitch.
Leitch began his career as a factory engineer, one of many Scots to construct the railways,
factories, sheds, and infrastructure within the British Empire. The Scots had a disproportionate
influence on the machinations of Britain in the 19th century, turning Glasgow into a hub
of industry, but they also dominated the landscape of football and sport in general in the late
19th and early 20th centuries.
As Simon Inglis writes in his wonderful Leitch biography Engineering Archie, “All the great
teams of the late Victorian Era - Preston North End’s ‘Invincibles’ of 1888-1889,
Sunderland’s ‘Team of All Talents’ in the 1890s - were built around Scottish talent.”
The influence of the Scots on industrial engineering, sport, and football itself meant that a man
like Archibald Leitch was the ideal candidate to design the seminal football grounds of
Britain.
But Leitch didn’t have groundbreaking design ideas, he simply saw the opportunity that
engineering football stadiums presented at a time when no one else did. Leitch saw, and
felt, the passion for the game and the growing number of fans determined to watch matches
up close. Inglis told Tifo,
“The one thing that makes Archibald Leitch different, or at least a pioneer, was not
that he had any particular special knowledge that got him into the business. It’s that
he saw the opportunities in the world of professional sport and, because of his love for football,
decided to go into it. He had no special knowledge that would enable him to do that, but then,
nobody did at that time.”
Born and raised in Glasgow, Leitch was a passionate Rangers fan, and was commissioned to design
Ibrox Park in 1899. Over the next three decades, Leitch was commissioned south of the border
at Bramall Lane, Ayresome Park, Craven Cottage, Stamford Bridge, Anfield, Ewood Park, Park
Avenue, Valley Parade, Goodison Park, White Hart Lane, Old Trafford, The Den, Leeds Road,
Roker Park, Highbury, and about 15 other stadiums.
So what did a Leitch designed stadium look like?
He moved the football grounds of the Victorian era from, as Inglis writes, “cinder and
gravel banks, muddied earth, wooden barriers nailed together and thumped randomly into
the ground,” to industrial, codified, and rigid terraces adorned with ‘crush rails’
to prevent the kind of disasters that befell those that braved the terraces of British
football throughout the 20th century.
David Goldblatt, sports journalist and sociologist, describes the Leitchian stadium in his book
The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer as, “An enclosed stadium that had a covered,
seated grandstand on one long side of the pitch and open terraces on the other three.
As the ambition of both clubs and designer grew, Leitch innovated by producing two-tier
grandstands, some with seating above and standing below… in his later efforts, he created
stadiums with cover on all four sides of the ground and seating and standing on each side
as well.”
Because of Leitch’s background in factory engineering, these grounds possessed a certain
industrial functionality; the goal was simply to pack as many paying fans into an area to
watch football as was possible. But Leitch wasn’t reckless. His designs were systematic
and precise. These stadiums were perfectly designed for fans to watch the football. The
sightlines were unobstructed, the placement of crush barriers and aisles meant that fans
couldn’t rush more than a few yards from their designated area.
Yet Leitch’s work was not without its flaws. Tragedy befell supporters at two Leitch-designed
stadiums, at Ibrox Park and Hillsborough almost a century apart. The Ibrox Disaster of 1902,
during a match between Scotland and England occurred as an upper part of the terrace snapped
and sent spectators falling “as if through a trapdoor.”
The resulting panic caused more casualties and deaths and a long protracted legal dispute
began to find the culpable party. Ultimately, 25 people died, at least 516 were injured,
and 587 would receive compensation. But this was the Machine Age, disasters like this were
quite commonplace. Trains going off the tracks, factories going up in flames, boilers combusting,
ships sinking, this was the cost of industry and progress.
Rangers had to decide who would redesign and reconstruct Ibrox Park in the wake of this
disaster. According to a letter from Leitch to the club chairman (obtained by Inglis)
the Glasgow club was very close to choosing another engineer, but ultimately decided to
retain Leitch.
He was determined to right the mistakes made at Ibrox, and a blueprint of his subsequent
designs for Craven Cottage in 1905 reveal a system of preventing the sort of crush and
overcrowding that occurred on the terraces of Britain throughout the 20th century. Inglis
writes that “Following the mistakes at Ibrox,” Leitch implemented “a system of distributing
passages and ‘crush rails’ fixed equidistantly between sunken aisles, each four feet in width.”
This became the standard amongst British terraces and was used by the Guide to Safety at Sports
Grounds (of which Inglis is the editor) in 1973, Leitch’s terrace design stood up over
half a century later as the pinnacle of stadium safety.
It’s clear that the Ibrox Disaster informed Leitch’s future designs to make sure there
were no repeats, and it was a departure from those designs that would lead to one of the
darkest days in English football.
Sports grounds, unlike stadiums, are subject to constant change. There is no final blueprint
when a ground is opened, and subsequent remodeling and redesigns are standard. At Anfield’s
Kop End, originally a Leitch design, redesigns during the 1920s, in which a roof was added,
ended up disastrously and for the next 50 years or so there were 40 casualties and injuries
a week in the Kop.
As was the case at Hillsborough, with renovations during the decades after initial construction
in 1913 changing the precision of Leitch’s designs.
While the failures at Hillsborough related more to crowd control and ineffective policing,
Inglis told Tifo,
“Had Hillsborough been designed to the kind of specifications that Leitch drew out at
say Chelsea and Fulham in 1904 and 1905... a good 80 years before the disaster, there
may not have been such great a loss of life… It’s a bit like you design a perfect car,
and someone comes along in two years and they change the wheels, or they change a bit of
the engine.” Ironically it was the disaster at Ibrox that
allowed Leitch to design a system that would have saved lives at Hillsborough some 80 years
later, but those designs had been eroded away by then.
As the football grounds of Britain change from the Leitchian grounds that became synonymous
with British football to more modern, continental-style stadiums, Leitch’s designs slowly fade from
view.
Fulham, Dundee United, Portsmouth, Everton, and Rangers are the only remaining original
Leitch stands or grandstands of the 40 or so grounds he engineered. The man who crafted
the look and feel of British football in its infancy died without any real fanfare in 1939,
but his legacy remains in the memories, legends, and the carnage of the terraces of British
football.