Archie's in with bricks

You ask any of the returnees. If the climb up its endless ramps to the cheap seats failed to quicken their pulse then a gander down into its vast concrete cavity was surely guaranteed to get the knees of even the doughtiest foot soldier of the Tartan Army wobbling with wonder.

In recent years we have come to call this assault upon our senses ‘the power of place’. And no-one knows this better than a sports fan.

At the San Siro no doubt your average Milanese would cite the Colosseum in Rome as the model for this modern mania.

But actually the Scots have a strong case for some bragging rights of their own. For the first great football stadiums of the modern era were in Scotland, and more precisely, in Glasgow.

Long before the San Siro had even a goalpost to its name; when Wembley was a mere village on the borders of London’s expanding metroland, Glasgow boasted the world’s three largest football grounds: Ibrox Park, Celtic Park and Hampden Park. By 1914 the combined capacity of the three was in the region of 200,000, and rising.

Glasgow was also home to the world’s first specialist football ground designer, Archibald Leitch - not to be confused with Archie Leach, aka Cary Grant - he was 20th century football’s most prolific and influential stadium designer. If you know your architectural history, Leitch was to football what Frank Matcham was to theatre. He was, quite simply, the man.

Between his first designs for Rangers and Kilmarnock in 1899, to his death in 1939, Archie’s client base included Sheffield United, Sheffield Wednesday, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Newcastle, Fulham, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Bradford City, Blackburn Rovers, Portsmouth, Southampton, Huddersfield, Millwall, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Derby County, Crystal Palace, Hearts, Dundee, Hamilton ... and, oh yes, he also designed the original Old Trafford for Manchester United in 1910 - in effect the first super stadium of the 20th century - and the original Highbury for Arsenal.

When England hosted the 1966 World Cup, six of the eight venues used were grounds designed in part or in whole by Archibald Leitch.

His greatest work? The South Stand at Ibrox Park, opened in 1929 and still resplendent today in its red brick glory under a modern mantle of glass and steel.

Not content with these major commissions, between the wars Archie was also responsible for the upgrading of Twickenham, the home of English rugby, and, closer to home, Hampden Park, which he expanded into the behemoth which eventually housed a world record 149,415 spectators in 1937 (not counting the extra 10,000 or so reputed to have gained entry without payment). In fact, Archie thought Hampden capable of holding more. His calculations put its maximum capacity at 163,782. Not one for understatement, was our Archie.

Wherever he worked Leitch told his clients - the David Murrays and Roman Abramovichs of his era - that theirs would be the largest stadium yet. Even homely little Craven Cottage on the banks of the River Thames, where Fulham still play, would one day stage internationals and cup finals, he told the local press.

But Archie, who eventually settled in a London mansion in 1915, was more than just what JM Barrie famously described as "a Scotsman on the make". He was also a man haunted by experience.

Born in 1865 in the industrial heartland of Camlachie, close to William Beardmore’s giant Parkhead Forge (where his blacksmith father may well have worked), Archie trod a well-worn path for bright boys from the tenements. At the age of 11 he won a place at Hutchesons Grammar School, then in the Gorbals; a school described as ‘a model of severity’ aimed at ‘promoting the intelligence of our working classes.’

In 1882 he was apprenticed to Duncan Stewart & Co at their London Road Iron Works, where he learnt the basics of engineering and draughtsmanship. He then spent three years at sea, following in the wake of thousands of enterprising Scots; the railway builders, the ship builders, the very builders of empire indeed. And on his return he built up his own business in St Enoch Square, spending his evenings teaching all that he had learnt to other young working-class hopefuls at the Glasgow Athenaeum and various Christian Institutes around the city.

Archie was no William Arrol though. He never scaled the heights of the great engineers of the period. In fact he made most of his living from designing bog-standard factories, around Britain and the colonies. Only one of his non-footballing structures is definitely known to have survived - the Sentinel Works in Jessie Street, Polmadie.

It is still worth a visit however. Although sadly derelict, when completed around 1903-04 it was Scotland’s first reinforced concrete building, and is now a Category A listed building.

His South Stand at Ibrox is also listed, as is Craven Cottage, which is now the oldest surviving Leitch structure at a football ground. This September will mark its centenary.

But if these grandstands and pavilions tell us something of Archie the architect, perhaps his greater contribution was as an engineer.

Here is what Glasgow’s Evening Times said of his first major football ground, Ibrox Park, on the morning of April 5 1902.

"No list of figures can adequately express the magnitude of the work undertaken by the designer of such a colossal undertaking. Mr Leitch has successfully tackled similar jobs on a smaller scale, but Ibrox Park is unique in many respects, and the utmost credit is due to him for the very substantial, stable, and artistic laying out of the grounds.

"Mr Leitch is a young man, but he has carried out a work which would be a credit to the most eminent engineer ... nowhere in the universe is there an athletic enclosure of such magnitude or of so compact and perfect a description."

A few hours later Archie’s whole world was in ruins. The collapse of a section of wooden terracing at Ibrox that afternoon caused the death of 25 spectators at the Scotland v England international. It was football’s first major disaster and one which Archie saw at first hand.

Later he wrote of his "unutterable anguish" as "the most unhappy eyewitness of all."

But was he to blame? In 1902 Scottish law did not allow for the holding of a public inquiry, as would be the automatic procedure today. Instead, one Alexander McDougall, the timber merchant who had supplied and fitted the wooden terracing, was tried for culpable homicide.

But throughout the two-day hearing at Glasgow’s High Court it was apparent that if anyone was in the dock, it was Leitch. Moreover, it appeared that such had been his love of Rangers - the club he supported throughout his life - that he had carried out all the work required by the redevelopment of Ibrox, between 1899-1902, without payment.

McDougall, the scapegoat, was acquitted by a sympathetic jury. Yet somehow Archie managed not only to escape censure, but he was kept on as consulting engineer by Rangers and went on to develop the art of stadium design, learning from the lessons of the disaster (which went much further than simply abandoning the use of timber).

The main result of those endeavours was the modern football terrace.

Not just the concrete treads and risers, but their dimensions, their form of construction, and not least, the very style of crush barrier upon which millions of football fans would lean over the ensuing decades.

In fact if you are over the age of 40 and ever stood on a terrace, it is highly likely that you were familiar with Leitch’s Patented Crush Barriers. Thousands of these barriers were supplied and fitted at football grounds all over Britain between 1905 and 1939, many of them surviving right up until the final abolition of terraces following the 1989 disaster at Hillsborough. They were so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible.

In that sense, Archie engineered his way out of the tragedy of 1902. He was, first and foremost, a practical man.

But what of his legacy? Today only 11 of his football stands survive. As mentioned earlier, those at Ibrox and Craven Cottage (plus the Cottage pavilion itself) are reasonably secure, having been granted statutory protection.

Of those that have been demolished, probably the best, and most missed, is the Trinity Road Stand at Villa Park, Birmingham, torn down five years ago. This stand was second only to that of Ibrox in terms of its architectural finish and detail.

Of the rest, there are two remaining Leitch double-decker stands at Everton’s Goodison Park, each featuring the familiar criss-cross steelwork balconies that became his trademark. (The South Stand at Ibrox remains a classic of that genre.) Portsmouth’s Fratton Park also has one, but this is about to be cut in half when the ground is redeveloped.

Dundee’s main stand is another Leitch survivor. Although hardly a work of sophistication, this section of Dens Park is nevertheless in fine fettle, having been considerably refurbished during the 1990s.

Less certain to survive is his McLeod Street stand at Tynecastle, a building whose construction just before the First World War led to a huge rift between Leitch and the Hearts board. Archie was not always the most reliable of cost controllers.

Elsewhere, the core of three Archie stands survive at Tottenham, Liverpool and Sheffield Wednesday, although you would need to have a keen eye to spot the original elements amid the modern extensions.

When Archie died in his north London home in 1939, there were no obituaries. His son, who carried on the business after the war, retired in 1955 and had no children of his own. All the company records were lost.

By the time I started researching the history and development of British football grounds in the early 1980s the name of Archibald Leitch was all but forgotten.

That we should remember him now is largely due to an initiative backed by English Heritage, the body which, south of the border, is the government’s statutory advisor on all aspects of the historic environment (the equivalent of Historic Scotland).

In 2002, to coincide with the Commonwealth Games, English Heritage launched a pilot study of Manchester, to establish whether Britain’s sporting heritage - not only its football grounds but its billiard halls, cricket pavilions, ice rinks, bowling greens and so on - were at risk.

The result is a series of books, called Played in Britain, of which Engineering Archie, a study of Archibald Leitch’s life and works, is a part. The first book in the series, Played in Manchester, was released last year. Future titles include studies of Birmingham and Liverpool, followed, it is hoped, by Played in Glasgow for 2007.

The intention is not to wallow in the past. We may be full of admiration for the San Siro and for the brave new superbowls of the 21st Century. We may crave modernity. But that is no excuse to turn a blind eye and allow our unique sporting heritage to be bulldozed into oblivion.

Just as in Rome where tourists flock to the Colosseum, who knows but 2,000 years from now visitors may well wander around the ruins of Hampden and marvel at how 22 grown men used to kick a pig’s bladder around the arena watched by thousands of tribal supporters. It may even be recorded that the ones who wore dark blue even used to win, once in a while.

Engineering Archie is published by English Heritage, price 14.99. Simon Inglis will be talking about the life and work of Archibald Leitch at the Lighthouse, Mitchell Lane, Glasgow, on April 7 at 6.30pm. For details see www.playedinbritain.co.uk.