The End

"The End" is a football story that has never been told before. As the era of an all-seater Premier League dawns, it won't be told again. It is an oral history of Arsenal's famous North Bank terraces from which generations of supporters have cheered and bemoaned the fortunes of the world's most famous football team. Sixty years of history - football, of course, but the stories, too, of families and friends, fights and passions, heroes and villains, the best and worst of the Great Saturday Afternoon Adventure - told in the words of the fans who have breathed passionate (and economic) life into Highbury since before the First World War. Tom Watt, a lifelong Arsenal fan himself, spent six months talking to supporters whose memories go back as far as bunking into the first game at Highbury in 1913, through the great years of the 1930s when Arsenal ruled the football world, and into the 1950s when the excitement of a return to football after the War gave way to the team's (but not the supporters') most anonymous years. The worst decade of football hooliganism is described by the fans who suffered (and, in some cases, enjoyed) it most. The prospect of an all-seater future is looked at by the terrace fans who have everything to lose as football prepares for its most significant change since emerging as the country's national game. Watt puts the North Bank story into context by talking to the players, the architects, the administrators, the police and first-aid workers who have serviced the Great Escape that begins for every fan on Saturday at three p.m. He takes advantage, too, of unique access to Arsenal's club records gate receipts, board minutes, press cuttings, programmes and supporters' magazines - to pull together the life of the oral history on which "The End" is built.