White Hart Lane, December 2016. Nearly 10 years ago, with Spurs preparing to temporarily leave home and promises of a brighter future everywhere you looked.
Football culture and architecture photographer Antonio Cunazza captured a ground, a culture and community being pulled apart. The old East Stand facade, empty caffs, disappearing corners of the stadium – all overshadowed by the steel and glass of what was coming next.
“I couldn’t fully understand it at the time, but luckily enough I was able to put that feeling in my photos in a natural way.
There was a sense of emptiness, like when you’re in the middle of a house move.
To see the state of the club 10 years later, it’s just sad.
This wasn’t the first time I went to White Hart Lane, but it was the last, about 4-5 months before the club temporarily moved to Wembley for construction to be completed. And in some ways it was bitter feeling,
With the new stadium slowly rising up around the old ground, I wanted to capture the essence of that changing time.
I had always found that area of Tottenham peculiar in many ways; multiethnic and rough in places. You could feel that, I liked it and White Hart Lane perfectly blended into it as a building that resonated with the borough’s heritage.
But at the time of shooting these, it proved to be different. The historical brick facade of the East Stand and the empty Jacks Cafe on a cloudy midweek morning seemed melancholy, while the north-east corner was already missing and hunted down by an enormous tree-look-a-like steel column of the future ground.
While it was fascinating to witness that transition time, I felt a sense of bleakness around, some emptiness I wasn’t expecting to feel. Future was approaching, something was being lost forever.”
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