Black boxes covering the designs which would soon travel the world over – that was the sight at Foster + Partner’s London offices last Tuesday morning, where a sense of anticipation and nerves prevailed.
Nerves because this was a big moment in Manchester United history. The last time plans such as these were announced was in the early 1900s. John Henry Davies was United’s club president then, and Ernest Mangnall our ‘secretary’. They didn’t have football ‘managers’ back then. Mangnall and Davies gathered pressmen around, and informed them that the club wanted to build a 100,000-capacity arena. It was an astonishingly ambitious plan for the time — some FA Cup finals drew only 40,000 crowds back then — but the public wouldn’t find out for many hours, not until the next morning’s newspapers.