Most big clubs moved out of town to grow. Newcastle United stayed on a hill in the middle of the city and built upwards, sideways and nearly into a park. St James’ Park is what happens when a club refuses to leave.
On top of the town
Newcastle has never had to look for its football ground. St James’ Park sits on high ground right in the city centre, and the newest parts of it are so big that they loom over the streets around them. The club’s own history of the ground calls it “a gleaming glass, steel and concrete icon of the Tyneside skyline”, which is the sort of thing clubs say about their stadiums. In this case it’s also true.
What’s less obvious, looking at all that glass and steel, is how old the place is. The same history says St James’ Park is “actually one of the oldest association football grounds in the country”. The modern stadium is a very new building on a very old site, and almost every argument in its history has been about whether the club should stay there or go somewhere else. It has always stayed.
That’s what makes the ground odd among the big English stadiums. Arsenal moved. Manchester City moved. Tottenham rebuilt next door. Newcastle kept squeezing more people on to the same piece of land near the top of town, and when the land ran out it built upwards. The result is lopsided, a bit awkward, and impossible to mistake for anywhere else.
A hospital, a chapel and a gallows
The name comes from long before football. According to the club, a hospital and chapel named St James’ once stood near where the Hancock Museum stands now. In 1542, the club history says, the master of St Mary’s and St James’ granted a lease on land with plots that ran up to Castle Leazes. St James Place was built on the site later, and the streets around what became St James’ Park, including St James Street, St James Terrace and Leazes Terrace, grew up in the early nineteenth century.
The names at either end of the pitch tell you even more. The Leazes End is named after Leazes Park and Leazes Terrace next door. The Gallowgate End, the club notes with a straight face, “takes its name from the city’s infamous gallows, which were last used in 1844”.
So one end of Newcastle’s ground is named after a park and the other after a place where people were hanged. It’s hard to think of a better summary of following a football club.
Before there was a United
Football came to the site before the club did. The club history says the first recorded game there, a practice match, took place in 1880. Newcastle Rangers, who had first played at the Drill Field in Gateshead before moving north of the river, used the ground, and when they folded in 1884, West End Football Club took over.
The same page also has a nice detail about women’s football, though its dates are muddled. One line says that “five years later” than 1880, 8,000 people watched a women’s exhibition match there involving Newcastle Rangers. A caption on the same page says United hosted a women’s exhibition match at St James’ Park in April 1895, watched by 8,000. Both can’t easily be right, since Rangers had folded by 1884, and the club doesn’t explain the gap. What’s clear is that a crowd of 8,000 came to watch women play football on this ground in the nineteenth century, which is more than you could say for most grounds for a long time after.
Then, in 1892, the city’s two big clubs came together. Newcastle East End and West End merged and formally moved into St James’ Park, the history says, “finally becoming Newcastle United”. When James Riach wrote in the Guardian in 2011 about a change of name that “ends 119 years of history”, that was the year he was counting from.
Sixty thousand and a swimming pool
Once it was United’s ground, it grew fast. The first major building work came in 1899, the club history says, with the capacity set at 30,000. By 1905 that had been doubled to 60,000, making it what the club calls a state-of-the-art venue “which even featured a swimming pool”.
That swimming pool is the kind of detail that makes you want to know much more than anyone has written down. The club doesn’t say where it was, who used it, or what happened to it. It just sits there in the history, like a mystery left in a drawer.
The 1920s brought big ideas. The club wanted a redevelopment by Archibald Leitch, the architect whose work, the history notes, can still be seen at Goodison Park, Craven Cottage and in the brick front of Ibrox. Some smaller improvements came early in the decade, and by 1926 there were plans including covered stands on all four sides. But the scheme got stuck in planning disputes, and, in the club’s words, “the project barely got off the ground”. That would turn out to be a theme.
Lights on the skyline
The next big change took more than twenty years. Floodlight pylons went up, and the first floodlit game at the ground was in February 1953, against Celtic. The club says almost 42,000 people came to see it, and George Robledo, the Chilean international, scored twice in a 2-0 win.
In 1958 the floodlights were upgraded in style. United paid £40,000 for four 190-foot pylons, which the club says were the biggest and best in Britain at the time. “The city’s skyline had a striking new feature,” the history adds. It’s the first time the ground really announced itself over the city, and it hasn’t stopped since.
Those were good years in other ways too. The club history talks about “United’s cup-winning exploits of the 1950s”, and an Independent piece by Simon Turnbull from 2011 records one day from that decade’s first season: a crowd of 66,926 at St James’ Park watching Newcastle beat Arsenal 2-1 in 1950-51, with goals from Jackie Milburn and Ernie Taylor. Newcastle won the FA Cup that season. A crowd of nearly 67,000 is a reminder of how many people this ground once squeezed in.
The ground that couldn’t be built
Then came the long frustration. The sixties, the club says, were a hard time for the club and for Tyneside’s football fans. Planning problems held up work on the ground again and again in the years before 1966, so Newcastle missed out on hosting World Cup matches. They went to Middlesbrough’s Ayresome Park instead. For a city as proud of its football as Newcastle, that must have stung.
The club thought about moving. Then, in 1971, it got a breakthrough. The history says the Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, a former FA referee, helped get plans for new stands approved, costing £1m over ten years depending on money. Building on the first phase, a new East Stand to replace the Popular Side terrace, began in 1972.
Then, as so often at St James’ Park, things went wrong. A recession hit and the club’s finances suffered badly. The East Stand was the only phase ever finished. Five years later the Leazes End was knocked down, and relegation at the end of the 1977-78 season wrecked the plans to rebuild it. For a while, the club notes, the Leazes End was left uncovered, just like the Gallowgate opposite. A big club in a big city had a ground that was partly missing.
After Bradford
The old West Stand, the main stand, carried on for a while longer. Then, in May 1985, came the fire at Bradford City’s Valley Parade, in which, as the club history records, 56 people died. After that, the Edwardian West Stand at St James’ Park was seen as a possible danger to the public. In 1987, after 82 years, it was finally pulled down.
Its replacement was named after the club’s most famous number nine. The Milburn Stand, named after Jackie Milburn, opened in 1988. The club describes it as “a smart, two-tiered structure” with seats upstairs and a paddock for standing supporters below.
It’s worth noting how the stadium changed. Little of it was done by long-term planning. Most of it happened because something went wrong, somewhere else, and the old stand suddenly looked too dangerous to keep. Football grounds in England in the 1980s were changed by tragedy far more than by ambition.
Sir John and the corners
The biggest change came in the 1990s. In 1992, the club history says, Sir John Hall became chairman, and with Kevin Keegan as manager, “spectacular change was achieved on and off the pitch”. In 1993 the club built the Sir John Hall Stand at the Leazes End and then filled in the corners.
By Euro 96, the club says, St James’ Park was a first-class all-seater stadium holding 36,610. Newcastle got the international tournament it had missed thirty years earlier. That might be the most satisfying line in the whole club history. After the planning disputes of the 1920s and 1960s, the ground finally got finished in time for something.
Five-nil
And then the stadium got the day that everyone in Newcastle seems to remember. On 20 October 1996, Newcastle beat Manchester United 5-0.
Glenn Moore’s report for the Independent started with the morning after: “There will be a fog on the Tyne this morning, the fog of thousands and thousands of hangovers.” People were singing until the early hours in the Bigg Market, on the Quayside, and in bars across the city. It was, Moore noted, Newcastle’s first league win over Manchester United in nine years and nine attempts, and it sent them three points clear at the top.
The goals came from Darren Peacock, David Ginola, Les Ferdinand, Alan Shearer and Philippe Albert. Peacock’s opener after 13 minutes, a header that Denis Irwin scrambled away, was given only after the referee, Steve Dunn, looked to his assistant. Even on slow-motion replays, Moore wrote, it was hard to tell if it had crossed the line, though it looked “just” as if it had. Then Ginola turned and hit a right-footed shot into the far corner, Ferdinand headed in off the bar, Shearer tapped in, and Albert chipped Peter Schmeichel, unchallenged, “just as Davor Suker had done in Euro ’96”.
Moore added the figures that made it historic. It was Manchester United’s heaviest defeat since losing 6-0 to Ipswich in 1980, and the worst defeat of Alex Ferguson’s 22 years in management. The attendance was 36,579, almost exactly the full capacity of the ground the club had just finished.
He also caught the small, human things. A fan ran on to bow down in front of Keegan. Eric Cantona, who had battled Albert all afternoon, refused to shake his hand at the end. When the final whistle went, Moore wrote, the crowd “roared in barely believing delight”. Keegan kept saying it was only three points. Newcastle didn’t win the league that season, so in a way he was right. But nobody who was there remembers it as just three points.
The park next door
After that, the ground ran into the same old problem: it was too small, and there was nowhere to put more seats. Sir John Hall had a big idea. The club history says he suggested a new multi-million-pound arena for the city’s sports teams in the next-door Leazes Park. The plans were withdrawn after political argument and local objections to building on the protected Town Moor.
So the club stayed. When Freddy Shepherd took over from Hall in 1997, the history says, Newcastle pressed ahead with expanding St James’ Park, and the plans were approved in July 1998. Building finished in 2000 at a reported cost of £43m, taking the seating capacity above 52,000 and giving the ground, as the club puts it, “the famous silhouette we know today”.
Anyone who has seen it knows the silhouette is lopsided, with some stands climbing high over the city and others kept lower, hemmed in by streets, a park and Leazes Terrace. It’s not a symmetrical stadium. It’s the shape of a club that couldn’t move and wouldn’t leave.
A brick in a bag
In November 2011 the club tried to change the one thing about the ground that nobody had ever touched: its name. Riach’s Guardian article reported that the owner, Mike Ashley, had temporarily renamed it the Sports Direct Arena, after his own company, “at no financial benefit to Newcastle”, while the club looked for someone to buy the naming rights.
The managing director, Derek Llambias, argued that the club had to become “financially self-sufficient”, and that a sponsor “must be given the opportunity to fully rebrand the stadium”. Mark Jensen, editor of The Mag fanzine, was “very, very disappointed”. The team were third in the league at the time. “It just seems very opportunist,” he said, “and it certainly won’t help the mood.”
Some fans went further. Turnbull’s Independent piece reported that a Newcastle supporter, Graeme Cansdale, dug up a commemorative brick on a walkway leading to the ground. He had bought it for his father eleven years before, and he was taking it back in protest. It’s hard to think of a quieter or more Geordie act of rebellion. He didn’t throw it. He just took it home.
The name comes back
The name came back eleven months later, and in a strange way. In October 2012, as David Conn reported in the Guardian, Newcastle agreed a four-year, £24m sponsorship with the payday loan company Wonga. After late talks, the deal came to include the stadium’s naming rights, and the ground would be called St James’ Park again. Conn noted that bringing back the old name was seen as a PR move, “because it is cherished by supporters”.
It didn’t calm everyone down. Michael Martin, editor of the True Faith fanzine, called the deal “shameful” and said it “tarnishes the club’s name, image and reputation”. Local MPs and the leader of the city council criticised it too. So the old name was handed back by a money-lender, as a kind of sweetener. Fans got their ground’s name back, and had to wear a loan company’s logo on their shirts in return.
Twenty years on
The ground’s biggest recent night came in October 2023. As Louise Taylor wrote in the Guardian, Newcastle beat Paris Saint-Germain 4-1 in their first home Champions League game for 20 years. The goals came from Miguel Almirón, Dan Burn, Sean Longstaff and Fabian Schär, two of them from players born just up the road. Taylor pointed out that Burn was from Blyth and Longstaff from North Shields.
Before the game, Taylor reported, the PSG coach Luis Enrique had warned his players that Newcastle was “a hostile but spectacular” place to play. He knew. He’d been on the losing side at St James’ Park in 1997, when Faustino Asprilla’s hat-trick beat Barcelona 3-2. When Burn dispossessed Ousmane Dembélé with a big tackle, Taylor wrote, the noise “suggested the Blyth-born defender might have sealed victory in the final”.
The game came almost exactly two years after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund bought the club, as Taylor noted. Almirón’s opener was Newcastle’s first Champions League goal since Alan Shearer scored at San Siro 20 years earlier, and the night ended, in her words, “amid unbridled geordie joy”. The 1996 crowd sang that the Toon would be champions. The 2023 crowd simply sang.
Flags on the Gallowgate
The modern ground looks different from the old one in another way too. Wor Flags, a group that describes itself as “fan-led, fan-funded”, makes flag displays for the stands. On its website, the Newcastle manager Eddie Howe calls one of the displays “a very touching moment”, and Kieran Trippier says “when we step out onto the pitch and you see the displays it gives us a lift”.
The group pays for displays at women’s games too. Jess Spark of Newcastle United Women talks on the site about “‘howay the lasses’ painted across the Gallowgate”, and Becky Langley says the sight still gives her goosebumps. That’s a nice thing to come back to. The club’s own history says 8,000 people watched women play here in the 1890s. Well over a century later, the Gallowgate was cheering for them again.
Why it stayed
It’s easy to say that St James’ Park is a special ground, and every club says that about its own. But this one really is unusual, and the reason is simple. Newcastle never left.
They didn’t leave when Leitch’s plans got stuck in the 1920s, or when the World Cup went to Middlesbrough. They didn’t leave when the recession stopped the rebuilding in the 1970s, or when the Leazes End stood uncovered. They didn’t leave when Sir John Hall wanted a new arena in the park next door. Each time, the club ended up back on the same piece of high ground, making it bigger.
Even the name came back. It took a sports shop owner, a brick dug out of a walkway and a payday lender to do it, but it came back.
So the ground is still where it was in 1892, on the old lands of a medieval hospital, between a park and a gallows. It’s a strange shape, and a bit too tall on one side. It’s built out of a hundred and thirty years of bad luck, ambition and refusal. And on a big night it’s still exactly where it’s always been, at the top of the town, watching over the city.
