St. James' Park is Newcastle's heart and soul - and tearing it down could come at a steep cost

The best view of St. James’ Park, home of Newcastle United for the past 132 years, isn’t from within the city itself – instead, it’s over the river, from the top of Sheriff Hill in Gateshead, from which point you see both the stadium in its full glory, a vast, bulky cathedral which towers monumentally over the city. It dominates and defines the cityscape the way football dominates and defines its people.

You wouldn’t call it pretty, perhaps, but bathed in its own light on a crisp, cold Tyneside night, the sheer scale of the place compared to everything else for miles around is remarkable. It’s Newcastle’s beating, 52,000-seater heart. Most grounds linger around the fringes of their towns, surrounded by car parks or industrial estates – St. James’ stands proud on a hill at the centre of everything, looming down over the universities, the crowded pedestrian streets and the bars of the Bigg Market. It’s not necessarily Britain’s best-looking stadium, or its grandest, but its position of power in the middle of everything makes it one of the most impressive, and its connection to the city it represents is unparalleled. And now they might tear it down.

Why Newcastle’s famous old ground could be no more

The Daily Telegraph reports that Newcastle’s board have recommended to their ownership group, led by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, that it would be better for the club to knock St. James’ Park down and build a new stadium rather than to expand the existing edifice. The project would cost an estimated £1.2bn. No doubt there are fine economic arguments in favour of such a move, but there is always the worry that Newcastle wouldn’t just lose a big old building, but a physical manifestation of its soul.

The good news is that the preferred plan wouldn’t see the team move far – indeed, the diagram presented for where the new stadium would be built directly overlaps with the Gallowgate End, which would be knocked down with the rest of the grand old ground to make room. The view over the Tyne from Sheriff Hill would be different, but at least something will still be there, a new centrepiece for the skyline. It may well be even more impressive than the stadium which stands there now.

There are quite a few issues with the proposal which may yet prove insurmountable. For starters, the development would require the club to concrete over a large portion of neighbouring Leazes Park, a Victorian-era recreation area which constitutes protected green space. The council will have reservations, and local residents will likely have a number of very reasonable protestations to make.

It also remains unclear whether Newcastle would be able to continue playing at St. James’ Park while the new stadium was built. A temporary move to another stadium would present challenges – Sunderland’s Stadium of Light is not an option due to safety concerns and Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium may well be rejected for the same reasons. The Telegraph’s report suggests that Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh, some 120 miles away and a good two hours by rail, could be an alternative temporary home, but that would surely be unpopular with supporters. There is a chance that the Newcastle could continue to play at St. James’ while the Gallowgate was taken down to make room, but there would be safety and logistical considerations.

It is still possible that the club’s owners decide instead to expand the existing stadium, which would be cheaper and easier in the short-term, or even find a site outside of the city centre, which would be a crying shame. A final decision has not been reached, fans groups have not been consulted, and with St. James’ Park set to host matches at the 2028 European Championship, it will likely be some years before ground is broken anywhere, for good or ill.

A new stadium needs to stay connected to the city

The initial preference for building a brand-new stadium may perhaps be linked to the instincts of the dominant Saudi faction of the ownership. Monumentality has been a central tenet of their country’s breathtakingly expensive campaign to massage the Kingdom’s image and to lay the foundations of a gradual shift from an oil and gas economy to a tourist one.

Building a vast, modernised stadium – initial plans suggest a capacity of around 70,000 – would tally with the seemingly endless building projects going on across Saudi Arabia and the other wealthy countries of the Arabian Peninsula, from shopping centres and seven-star hotels to the city of Neom, the so-called “cognitive city” being built from scratch in the Arabian desert.

Shiny, expensive construct projects have been the Saudi PIF’s calling card at home, and there is no reason to expect them to act differently abroad. At least in England, the people who build it will be protected by decent labour laws, unlike those liable to die in droves building the grounds for the 2034 World Cup.

Newcastle are, in any case, now a deeply ambitious club looking to become one of English football’s dominant forces. A fully modernised new stadium with a greatly expanded capacity would, in some ways, fit the vision of a giant of the contemporary game, although it would feel unfair to feel that the existing ground is especially outmoded. The worry is less that a stadium would be unimpressive, but that the owners could instead expand upon what already exists for half of the money, with half of the disruption to local residents, and without perhaps requiring fans to travel all the way to Scotland to watch their own team play. If they decide to build a gleaming new arena simply because impressing through colossal building projects is their preferred way to dazzle the world, it would be doing supporters a disservice.

From the point of view of those fans – or even from the point of view from Sheriff Hill down the Old Durham Road – a new ground may well prove to be a good thing, of course. Some new stadiums can be a little soulless, but Tottenham Hotspur have proven that up-to-date amenities can be combined with a genuinely impressive edifice. The sequel to St. James’ Park, 150 years after football was first played there, may well be even better both to look at from a distance and to sit and watch a match in. They could even finally realise Tottenham’s forgotten dream of a cheese shop, although perhaps a Greggs would be more thematically appropriate.

The plan for a new build would, at least, not greatly extend many supporters’ traditional pilgrimage from The Strawberry to the stands. One of the many benefits of the current ground’s uniquely central location is that nearby watering holes exist in great abundance – a recent survey, which went viral, revealed that there are no fewer than 174 pubs and bars within one mile of St. James’ Park, more than three times as many as any other Premier League ground.

The survey spawned a thousand jokes about Geordies’ reputation for enjoying their good times with just a little bit of alcoholic assistance, but that proximity between post-match pint and game time is also a part of the reason that Newcastle’s team and town share an unusually close connection. Newcastle is St. James’ Park, and St. James’ Park is Newcastle. When they say that the city is black and white, they aren’t exaggerating.

Whatever the future of St. James’ Park holds, and whatever ground Newcastle United play their football in five or ten years from now, it’s that connection which needs to be maintained. Even the most impressive ground out on the fringes of the city would rob the town of a part of its history, its community and its heart. Let’s hope that when the plans are drawn and the diggers roll in, the club and its owners remember that.