Ibrox Stadium
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| Ibrox Stadium | |
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 The main façade of Ibrox Stadium stands on Edmiston Drive |
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| Location | Glasgow, Scotland |
| Opened | 1899 |
| Owner | Rangers Football Club |
| Surface | Grass |
| Architect | Archibald Leitch |
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| Capacity | |
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Ibrox Stadium, originally Ibrox Park, is the stadium of Rangers F.C. It is located on the south side of the River Clyde in the Ibrox district of Glasgow, Scotland. As one of the oldest and largest stadia in Britain, as the site of two major disasters and as one of the first wave of predominantly all-seater football grounds, Ibrox is a stadium of widely acknowledged architectural and historic significance.
The site of Ibrox Park has been the home of Rangers since 1899. On April 2, 1902 during the annual international game with England, twenty-five people were killed and over 300 injured when a wooden stand collapsed in what was then football's worst disaster.
In 1929 the construction of the Main Stand, to the south side of the ground, began. Its designer was Archibald Leitch, the Scottish engineer responsible for stands at the grounds of Arsenal, Manchester United, Everton, Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea and Aston Villa. Leitch's work was later to become amongst the most celebrated of football architecture. The Main Stand at Ibrox provides a classic example of Leitch's characteristic style of criss-cross steelwork balustrades. Like Leitch's stand and pavilion at Fulham's Craven Cottage, the architectural significance of the Ibrox Main Stand is reflected in its status as a Category B listed building.
With the Main Stand completed, the bowl-shaped ground was one of Britain's largest football stadia, second only to Hampden Park, also in Glasgow's south side. A record crowd of 118,567 gathered in January 1939 for a league match with Celtic. This remains the record attendance for a league match in Britain.
The appearance of the stadium changed little for several decades, until a dramatic redevelopment over the final decades of the twentieth century. The first major innovation came with the construction of the Copland, Broomloan and Govan stands in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This involved a radical reshaping of the stadium, with the old bowl-shaped configuration replaced by three new, freestanding stands, alongside the remaining Main Stand. The spur was the Ibrox disaster of 1971, which prompted the club, led by General Manager Willie Waddell, to begin to develop a more modern - and safe - stadium. This involved the removal of, first, the east terracing (the traditional Rangers end, sometimes colloquially called 'the Derry') and its replacement with the 7,500-seat Copland Road stand. An identical stand on the west side of the ground, the Broomloan, was added a year later. The redevelopment was completed with the 11,000-seat Govan stand, which replaced the benched-seating Centenary Stand, built in 1973.
The result of this ambitious redevelopment was what was widely acknowledged as by far the most modern club football ground in Britain. A capacity of around 44,000 was considerably smaller than the 85,000 or so that had preceded it. However, the redeveloped Ibrox, with some 36,000 seats, foreshadowed the advent of all-seated stadia for all Britain's principal football clubs, as required by the Taylor Report of 1989.
A further series of developments was instituted in the early 1990s to enable the stadium to comply with the requirements of the Taylor Report. A third tier - the Club Deck - was added to Leitch's Main Stand. The remaining standing areas of the ground, the east and west enclosures of the Main Stand, were seated at around the same time. In an effort to expand the stadium's capacity, the configuration of the now all-seated stadium was altered in the mid-1990s, and two additional areas of seating added in the spaces between the Govan and Copland/Broomloan stands. The ground's name was officially changed to Ibrox Stadium after renovations completed in 1997. By 2005, the stadium's all-seated capacity was 50,411.
In 2006, a further series of incremental increases in the stadium's capacity began with the addition of two rows of seating on the front of the upper tier of the Govan stand. Linked to a new 'Bar 72' area (named in honour of the club's triumph in the 1972 European Cup Winners' Cup), the new area accommodated 638 'premium' seats. At the club's AGM in 2006, chief executive Martin Bain announced that further schemes were probable for the Copland and Broomloan stands, raising overall stadium capacity by around 800 to a total of approximately 51,900.
In partnership with the Las Vegas Sands corporation, the club sought to develop land adjoining Ibrox as the home of Britain's first 'regional casino' (also called 'super casino'). The casino was to be accompanied by a Rangers-themed leisure complex. In 2005, Glasgow City Council approved outline planning permission for the development at Ibrox [1] (followed subsequently by approval of additional plans elsewhere in the city). Britain's Casino Advisory Panel reviewed bids from eight short-listed cities and in 2007 awarded the first license to Manchester. There is no immediate prospect of the Ibrox proposal being resurrected.
The Main Stand was renamed the Bill Struth Main Stand in September 2006 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the club's most celebrated manager.
The stadium is one of 28 European stadiums which have UEFA's 5-star rating, enabling it to host finals of the UEFA Champions League and the European Championship.
Between Rangers' goalless draw with Hearts on January 27, 2007 and their next home game, against Falkirk on February 18, the Ibrox pitch was relaid.[2]
Tours of the stadium are available - see the official Rangers website for details.
[edit] References
- ^ Rangers F.C. score with casino plan - BBC News
- ^ Sky Sports News, February 13, 2007
[edit] See also
- History of Rangers F.C.
- Rangers F.C.
- Ibrox disaster - Two disasters in 1902 and 1971; however, the term usually means the 1971 incident.
[edit] External links
- The history of Ibrox on Rangers' official site.
- Photographs of Ibrox Stadium In Glasgow
- The brochure produced to accompany the redevelopment of Ibrox in the late 1970s.
- Ibrox at Google Maps.
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