An image of Mark GowerTate Liverpool and RIBA North are currently hosting the Home Ground: The Architecture of Football exhibition until late-January 2026. Mark Gower (left) tells us all about the exhibition and why fans should consider checking it out…
We are all aware that football stadiums are far more than places where matches are played; they are living monuments of culture and identity, architectural landmarks that bind generations through shared emotion, ritual, and belonging. Home Ground: The Architecture of Football, presented by RIBA North in partnership with Tate Liverpool and curated by RIBA’s Pete Collard, explores this deep relationship between football and its built environment.
At its heart, the exhibition celebrates how architecture shapes community and memory, from standing on terraces with parents and grandparents to the collective anticipation that defines the matchday experience.
Beyond its content, what makes Home Ground: The Architecture of Football so powerful is its ability to reach beyond traditional audiences for art, design, and architecture exhibitions. RIBA North have created an exhibition that speaks to anyone who simply loves football.
I visited with my 21-year-old nephew, like me, a West Ham season ticket holder and now a student at Liverpool Hope University. It was his first experience of going to an exhibition, and we replicated our matchday ritual with a pre-exhibition beer to discuss what we might see.
The concept for the exhibition is framed by two of Everton Football Club’s home grounds, starting with Goodison Park, designed by Archibald Leitch in 1909, and ending with the club’s new Hill Dickinson Stadium, designed by Dan Meis.
Between these significant bookends, visitors move through a sequence of themes that chart the history of football architecture, from early 20th-century terraces to contemporary cathedrals of sport, encountering stories of design, identity, politics, and transformation along the way.
The exhibition begins with beautiful, grainy footage of three early matches: Liverpool vs Small Heath at Anfield in 1901, an unknown game at Turf Moor in 1903, and Bolton Wanderers vs Burton United in 1904. These games, played against an industrial backdrop of chimneys and railway lines, capture football’s raw architectural origins, masses of fans spilling into grounds and the emerging need for structures that could safely manage both the passion and scale of the game.
As you turn the corner, there is an area dedicated to the prolific Archibald Leitch, showcasing exquisite hand-drawn technical drawings alongside black-and-white photographs of Stamford Bridge, Highbury, and Goodison Park.
Leitch’s work defined an era when stadium design had no precedent, and his architectural language, latticework, rhythmic terraces, and community proximity, still resonates in football’s visual DNA.
Alfred Hind Robinson’s panoramic photograph of the 1920 FA Cup Final at Stamford Bridge is especially captivating: at first glance you notice a flowing wave of spectators occupying the oval terraces, its true scale only becoming clear when you spot the tiny, blurred figures climbing the uncovered stairs from Fulham Road.
The section The Modern Spectacle shifts focus to mainland Europe, exploring how stadiums became political symbols.
A hand-drawn perspective of Camp Nou (1957), designed in the international modernist style, captures Catalan resistance under Franco’s regime, while the Stadio Comunale Giovanni Berti, built in Mussolini’s Italy, embodies fascist ideals of physical strength through exercise. These contrasts underscore how football architecture can both reflect and resist power.
Twin Towers explored © Mark Gower
Back in the UK, the exhibition revisits the 1923 “White Horse” FA Cup final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United in the section called Twin Towers.
The black-and-white image of police struggling to clear the overcrowded Wembley pitch, a match that somehow went ahead, still astonishes. Having grown up in Wembley, the Twin Towers were as iconic to me as any historical London landmark. How they were ever demolished is as baffling as the long queues of people waiting to get into Madame Tussauds.
The section Years of Neglect soberly recounts how poor maintenance, outdated design, and negligence led to tragedy, notably the Bradford City fire (1985), Heysel (1985) and Hillsborough (1989). The Hillsborough disaster prompted the Taylor Report and the transformation to all-seater stadiums, a turning point that redefined the relationship between football, spectators, safety, politics, and design. This evolution is illustrated within The Last Stand.
In Move or Improve, two contemporary photographs stand out. Mark Leech’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium exterior contrasts a gleaming new structure framed by a council estate complete with a rotary washing line, while Alex Livesey’s image of the Estádio Municipal de Braga, carved into a limestone quarry, shows architecture as landscape, theatre, and spectacle all at once.
Model of the Estádio Municipal de Braga © Mark Gower
If you like architectural models you will not be disappointed. Alongside the model of the Estádio Municipal de Braga, which looks as though the stadium has been reversed into the quarry, are models of Zaha Hadid Architects’ proposal for the first all-timber stadium for Forest Green Rovers, another planet-centred innovation by the world’s first vegan football club, and the San Siro in Milan, which anchors four key themes of the exhibition: Brutalist Football, World Cup Fever, Italia 90, and On the Map.
Italia ’90 and a model of the San Siro © Mark Gower
The final section, Next Season, brings the story into the present with a striking wireframe drawing of the Hill Dickinson Stadium. Having missed West Ham’s first visit to Everton’s new ground (the game was moved to a Monday night – thank you, Sky and the Premier League), I booked myself onto the stadium tour before attending the exhibition and was struck by many design elements of this impressive new ground.
The overarching brief from the football club to the architects was to replicate key aspects from Goodison Park, including atmosphere and the supporters proximity to the pitch. I can’t speak to atmosphere, but the stands have a rake that is a steep as legislation allows, and seats in all four corners are as close as they can physically get.
While inside the ground there is a tightness, walking around the concourse offers openness and transparency, with beautiful views across the city connecting the stadium to its community. The detailing is lovely, with subtle nods to Leitch’s latticework and dockyard-inspired cues, but the highlight of the tour for me was how a key user, Everton’s manager, adapted the architectural scheme before a ball was kicked in the new stadium. Our brilliant tour guides, Will and Kenny, explained three seemingly small yet revealing interventions made by David Moyes to give him and his team a marginal edge.
Firstly, Moyes removed the front row of seats in the home dugout so he could sit higher achieving a slightly better view and to be positioned above the opposition manager and their staff. Next, he eliminated the proposed away manager’s office from the design scheme, moving it into the away dressing room in the form of a table and two basic folding chairs. Finally, he insisted that doors be added to the circular home dressing room, ensuring that “what was said in the dressing room stayed in the dressing room”.
While these are minor changes they hint at something larger: the potential of stadium architecture to influence performance. While the design of new stadiums has rightly prioritised fan experience and safety, home success has often been measured by atmosphere and acoustic intensity. But by doing this, are architects and football clubs at risk of overemphasising noise as the key driver of home advantage?
The Tottenham Hotspur and Hill Dickinson stadiums both seek to replicate Borussia Dortmund’s “Yellow Wall,” designed to amplify crowd energy. Yet data from matches played without spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic (Bryson, Dolton, Reade, Schreyer and Singleton, 2020) showed that home advantage persisted even without home support.
This research reveals an unexplored aspect of football architecture. Stadiums are rarely designed or adapted in collaboration with managers, coaches, players, or analysts to improve performance. Exploring how design and architecture can shape both the fan experience and the performance of those on the pitch may be the next evolution in football architecture.
Visiting both the Hill Dickinson Stadium and RIBA North’s Home Ground: The Architecture of Football exhibition was a thought-provoking day. The day reaffirmed the ability football has to bring people together.
Even though Everton have moved to a new ground The Sun journalists are still banned from the press rooms of the Hill Dickinson Stadium as they were at Goodison Park, and the exhibition matters because it also bridges worlds, it brings football fans into the realm of art and design. It allowed my nephew and me to view football through an architectural lens within the context of an art gallery. The exhibition sparked conversations about art, space, memory, and belonging that continued in the pub long after we left.
I urge supporters, designers, and architects to visit this show, which charts the evolution of our home grounds from concrete terraces to state-of-the-art stadia, and reminds us that football, at its best, has always been about place, people, shared experience, and new ideas.
Mark Gower is Associate Professor and Head of the 3D Design Department at Kingston University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He graduated from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1999 where he received a commendation for his dissertation “Football’s Hidden Architecture” which has informed his current research exploring how architecture can improve the performance of football players. Whilst at school, Mark was signed by Newcastle United and spent a year with the club before being released.