Column
Community
Culture
Football
Sport
4 min read

I’ll miss football’s disappearing cathedrals

Sharing the same physical space as those that go before is a spiritual act.
A CGI image of a son and dad holding hands on the concourse of a modern stadium.
The 'new' Old Trafford.
MUFC.

On the way back from a gig a few weeks ago, my dad asked me a question. “Are there any artists that you’d be so up for seeing that you’d pay anything for a ticket?” 

Paul McCartney? Julian Lage? Stevie Wonder? 

That’s about it really. Notwithstanding the fact that I’m running out of internal organs to sell to afford gig tickets nowadays, it struck me that a lot of the people I’d pay anything to see are now all dead. Some of them died long before I was born: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon (as part of The Beatles), John Bonham (as part of Led Zeppelin). And then there are the bands who split up before I was born, especially Waters-Gilmour-Wright-Mason era Pink Floyd and Gabriel-Hackett-Banks-Rutherford-Collins era of Genesis. 

But there are a few artists I wish I’d had the chance to see in the fleeting moments we were alive at the same time. David Bowie, Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Neil Peart (of Rush), Jeff Buckley (although as a 4-year-old when he died, he probably would have been lost on me back them.)  

I was thinking about this question again while watching the Merseyside football derby in February. It was a proper Merseyside derby. By this, I meant that it ended up with fans on the pitch, fights, two players being sent off, and both Liverpool’s manager and assistant manager being sent off too. A proper Merseyside derby.  

It was also the last ever Merseyside derby to be held at Goodison Park. And that made me profoundly sad.  

I’ve driven past Goodison a fair bit. You catch site of it looming over Stanley Park as you walk up to Anfield. But I’ve never actually been to a match at Goodison. And now I never will. Goodison will soon join a growing list of football grounds that no longer exist: Highbury, Maine Road, White Hart Lane, The Dell, the Boleyn Ground. All gone.  

Along with Goodison, another stadium has been added to the scrap pile in recent days. You may have heard of it: Old Trafford.  

Yes, Manchester United – who last month announced 200 redundancies at the club, having previously made 250 members of staff redundant last year – have made the decision to spend £2bn on leaving the historic and iconic, if crumbling, Old Trafford stadium to move to a new 100,000-seat stadium. Turns out I only have a few more years to go to Old Trafford before it becomes another page in my book of regrets.  

Highbury. Maine Road. White Hart Lane. The Dell. The Boleyn Ground. Goodison. Old Trafford. These are football’s cathedrals, and they are disappearing.  

And all of this reminds me about the kind of debates that pop up whenever a church building – whether active or defunct – is used for a purpose that some Christians find disrespectful or blasphemous. Church buildings are often contested spaces; what goes on within them is policed in a way that simply isn’t the case for many other public spaces. Should they host heavy metal gigs? Should disused churches be converted into housing, as this slightly bizarre article seems to revel in.  

When I used to live in Nottingham, there was a bar in the centre of town located inside an old church. It’s a gorgeous old building and it has largely survived the conversion into a bar. It is, it must be said, a lovely place for a drink. But it’s difficult not to feel at least a tinge of sadness that, where that place once reverberated with the sound of praise and worship, it now echoes with the thrum of drinks orders and club music. It feels haunted with the presence of God. 

Look, things change, I know that. I’m not so nostalgic as to think that everything needs to stay as it was when I was a child. But it’s hard not to wonder about the histories that are being lost, and the stories that are being forgotten, when we demolish or repurpose our church buildings, or our football stadia.   

There is a reason why we preserve our history, and our cultural heritage. Sharing the same physical space as those that go before us is a supremely spiritual act. We visit castle ruins, old churches, and war-torn battlefields because they connect us to those that went before. We enter the stories of those people and realise that perhaps they aren’t so different from our own stories. 

Come May, the Gwladys Street End at Goodison will have sung its last song. In the near future, Old Trafford’s Stretford End will fall silent, too. Liverpool’s owners FSG have come in for a lot of criticism since taking over in 2010. But, along with appointing Jürgen Klopp, their decision to renovate rather than move away from Anfield will surely go down in history as an unqualified success. It is a place that reeks of history, of stories past. And those stories shape and underwrite the club’s stories in the present.  

Again: things change, I get that. But whether it’s the church’s buildings or football stadia, we lose these spaces – and the stories born within them – at great cost to ourselves.  

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Review
Art
Culture
Film & TV
War & peace
4 min read

Not for glory or galleries, capturing modern wars through art

Mary Kinmonth documents the battles women artists see.
In a bombed-out tiled room, two art works hang in the shape of a tiled jacket and shape
Second Hand 7, by Zhanna Kadyrova
Foxtrot Films.

 

When it comes to war, what do women see that men don’t? This is the question asked repeatedly throughout British filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s new documentary War Paint: Women at War. The third part of a trilogy, the film focuses on the stories of female artists who have created art in their experience of war and conflict. From British women during the London Blitz to those responding to contemporary conflicts in Iran, Ukraine and Sudan, the film takes a thoughtful look into how war has been experienced by those who have been previously excluded from the story. 

Zhanna Kadyrova is a Ukranian artist working from a progressing front line. One sequence shows a fight against time as her team attempts to remove one of her public sculptures as the front line draws closer. Kadyrova operates in recent conflict zones– one of her series involves transforming tiled walls in bombed-out rubble into clothes that appear to hang from the remaining walls. In the wake of violent destruction, Kadyrova wants you to remember the lives left behind. 

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and artist working from New York. Her work brings together the weapon, the human body, the veil, and the text of the Qu’ran to ask questions of the impacts of the Iranian war on women.  Neshat makes you look right into the eyes of these women– she puts weapons of war into their hands and thus gives them agency that the Iranian government has taken away. 

Marcelle Hanselaar’s work shows the unspoken side of war- depicting the aftermath of violence and sexual assault that many women experience when conflict rips through their homes. 

Women at War brings the audience through one female artist after another, depicting a diversity of styles, voices, and perspectives that range from official war commissions to illegal graffiti. The artists shown don’t even all agree with filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s premise - that women always see things differently from men. But what they bring together is a view of war far removed from ideas of national glory that often line the halls of national galleries. 

The filmmaker’s own art teacher, the painter Maggi Hambling, says this: 

“For men, victory and defeat marks the end of a war. For the woman, the war doesn’t end.” 

Knowing the consequences and aftermath of war– destroyed communities, post traumatic stress disorder, sexual violence, broken families, that war is more than valiance– isn’t a perspective held by women alone. 

According to a recent YouGov poll, “a third of 18-40 year olds would refuse to serve in the event of a world war – even if the UK were under imminent threat of invasion.” Among reasons listed are an unwillingness “to fight for the rich and powerful – who they see as profiteers or otherwise unfairly able to avoid the consequences of conflict themselves.”

As one respondent put it: "My life is more valuable than being wasted in a war caused by rich people’s greed."

Women have been speaking up for the last 50 years, and the young have heard them. War is not glory, but trauma. Young people see this when they look around. They don’t easily buy into nationalist rhetoric and have no pretenses about the glory of war. They know war is not a place to seek accolades upon accolades, but an evil reality that pays an inordinate toll on human society. 

Today, global tensions are high, and war seems more possible a reality for many in England than previously. Keir Starmer has said the government will increase military defence spending to 2.5 per cent of the national budget by 2027. But Brits aren’t lining up to buy their uniforms. 

If the UK government expects its young citizens to prepare for conflict, they need to be honest about what that involves. They need to be prepared to face a knowing crowd about the realities of war and show a willingness to fight for their lives during peacetime. It’s not that young people are politically disinterested or unwilling to take a stand when it matters. Students at universities rising up in pro-Palestine protests or climate activism reveal that they care greatly about the world they are living in. They want to take an active role in shaping it, and aren’t afraid to face consequences if they find a worthy fight. 

Political commentators used to think we have reached “the end of history” with liberal democracy the last man standing. But War Paint: Women at War shows us that even an end to war doesn’t bring the end of suffering. It complicates the narrative that war is a path to victory. Everyone pays the price of war, yet those in power rarely bear the burden. If leaders want young people to fight for their country, they must first prove they are fighting for them. Otherwise, no one will answer the call.

 

View stills from the film and find screening times.

Watch the trailer

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.
If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.
Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief