Updated October 2026
Coventry City are back in the Premier League.
Twenty-five years after relegation ended a 34-year stay in the top flight, the Sky Blues have returned – but to a very different football landscape and a very different home.
The last time Coventry played Premier League football, Highfield Road was still at the centre of the club and the community surrounding it.
For more than a century, from 1899 until 2005, the ground stood among the streets of Coventry, woven into matchday life. Supporters walked familiar routes towards the stadium, crowded into local pubs and shops and returned to the same stands and seats week after week.
Photographer Jason Scott Tilley knew it intimately.
A lifelong Coventry City supporter and former local newspaper photographer, Jason grew up close enough to hear the rise and fall of the Highfield Road crowd drifting across the city on Saturday afternoons.
His photographs from 1999 to 2005 document the closing years of the ground – but they are not really about a stadium alone.
They are about everything surrounding it.
It Was Never Just About the Football
Jason’s relationship with Coventry City started long before he began photographing the club professionally.
He worked as a photographer for the Coventry Evening Telegraph and the Saturday sports paper The Pink, part of a generation of regional press photographers embedded within the communities they covered.
Football photography was different then.
Photographers could work close to the touchline and move around spaces that would now be tightly controlled. Jason remembers being so close to the action that Coventry striker Cyrille Regis once landed on top of him during a game.
But the photographs collected in Highfield Road 1999-05 look beyond the players.
Supporters outside shops. People gather on the streets. Pubs before kick-off. Floodlights rise above neighbouring buildings. Familiar faces occupy familiar spaces.
Jason has described those memories simply:
“It never was just about the football.”
For him, matchday meant the walk through crowded streets, burger vans, finishing a pint before kick-off and the same supporters returning to the same places season after season.
Those apparently ordinary details are what now give the photographs their weight.
Football at the Heart of the Community
Highfield Road existed physically inside Coventry.
Unlike many modern stadium developments, it was not separated from everyday life by acres of car parks or retail development. Houses, streets, pubs and shops pressed up against the ground.
That proximity shaped the culture surrounding it.
Jason’s photographs record those connections without romanticising them.
His background in newspaper photography gives the work a directness. The images are observational and unembellished: people going about familiar routines, often unaware that the ordinary details around them would soon disappear.
Looking back, Jason describes football from that period through the ideas of community and loyalty.
That feeling is visible throughout the photographs.
The ground belongs visually to the people around it.
Coventry City’s Final Premier League Years
The beginning of Jason’s series coincided with the end of Coventry City’s long spell in the top flight.
The club had been part of English football’s highest division since 1967.
By the 1999-2000 season, Highfield Road was hosting Premier League football against Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Newcastle and the other major clubs of the era.
A year later, that run came to an end.
Coventry were relegated in May 2001, ending 34 consecutive seasons in the top flight.
What followed was a difficult period for the club, but Highfield Road remained constant for another four years.
That makes Jason’s archive particularly significant now.
The photographs bridge two periods: the final years of Coventry as a Premier League club and the final years of the stadium that had housed them for more than a century.
Twenty-five years later, Coventry have finally returned to the Premier League.
Highfield Road has not.
The Final Years of Highfield Road
Coventry City played their final game at Highfield Road in 2005.
By then the club had spent 106 years at the ground.
For several seasons there had been plans to move elsewhere, but Jason’s photographs rarely feel like images made in anticipation of a farewell.
That is part of their strength.
Highfield Road is still functioning.
Supporters arrive. Stewards work. People drink in the surrounding pubs. Children walk towards the ground. Matches come and go.
There is no constant sense that a historical document is being deliberately created.
Instead, Jason photographed what was in front of him.
That everyday quality has become increasingly important with time.
Once the ground disappeared, the peripheral details within the photographs became part of its history too.
When a Football Ground Disappears
Highfield Road was demolished in 2006 and the site redeveloped for housing.
The stadium disappeared from the Coventry landscape.
Jason later returned to the area where it once stood.
His reaction was unequivocal:
“They destroyed something great.”
For supporters who spent decades going there, the loss of a football ground is rarely only architectural.
Grounds become connected to people and periods of life.
A particular entrance recalls going with a parent. A section of terracing brings back friends. A pub recalls a routine repeated hundreds of times. Even the walk towards a stadium can become embedded in memory.
When the physical place disappears, photographs take on another role.
They become evidence.
Photography as a Record of Place
Jason Scott Tilley’s photographs now sit within a much broader archive of football grounds that no longer exist.
But Highfield Road 1999–05 is particularly personal.
These are not photographs made by somebody visiting Coventry to document a disappearing stadium.
They were made by somebody who belonged to the place.
Jason was a supporter, a Coventry photographer and someone whose professional and personal history was tied to the city.
That familiarity allowed him to recognise what mattered beyond the obvious action.
The photographs preserve the faces, buildings, signs, streets and small routines that would otherwise be easy to forget.
Football grounds are often remembered through famous goals and players.
Photography can preserve everything else.
Explore Highfield Road 1999–05 →
Highfield Road 1999-05 | Jason Scott Tilley
A poignant photographic record of Coventry City’s Highfield Road in its final years, observing the spaces, people, and rituals that shaped matchdays long before the ground was erased.
A limited edition A5 zine containing 38 black and white photographs across 44 pages.
Highfield Road 1999-2005
The Lower Block Edition brings together 38 of Jason Scott Tilley’s black-and-white photographs from the final years of Highfield Road.
The sequence moves through the ground and the community surrounding it, documenting supporters, streets, pubs, floodlights and the everyday experience of going to the match.
It is not simply a record of Coventry City’s old stadium.
It is a record of the culture that existed around it.
As Coventry City begin another chapter in the Premier League, these photographs provide a route back to the place where the club’s previous top-flight story ended.
The football has moved on.
The photographs remain.
Suggested Lower Block Editions
Explore Lost Football Grounds Collection →