Tottenham need to think again over new stadium

Yet its ground stands in the most deprived ward in London.

Tottenham High Road is a thoroughfare that goes back to Roman times, somewhat battered now but still lined with ornate fragments of Victoriana and handsome Georgian houses from the days when this was a prosperous rural satellite of London.

Modern football stadia, by contrast, are vast relentless machines for processing tens of thousands of people, objects at an utterly different scale from an ordinary high street.

So when Tottenham Hotspur propose a new 58,000-seat stadium, rising to 42 metres high, as well as 450 flats, a hotel and a supermarket to help pay for it, worlds collide.

Power meets poverty, and the silvery disc of the arena descends like a UFO, whooshing pubs and shops and the odd listed building into oblivion. It is as pure a symbol of the relative might of club and borough as you could wish for.

Except Spurs are not having it all their own way. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) has pronounced itself "disappointed" with the project and "does not support it".

It finds it "incoherent" and "awkward". English Heritage, while still finalising its position, says that the plan threatens "a serious and significant level of harm to the historic environment".

Objections like these can prompt a public planning inquiry, or derail the whole project, whose cost will be £400 million. And, as things stand, it's hard to disagree with CABE.

It's not that the stadium shouldn't be there. Spurs considered other options from Milton Keynes to Wembley to taking on the Olympic site and opted to stay where they are now, relocating just to the north of their current ground.

It wouldn't do Haringey any good if this local icon, major employer and earner of revenue went somewhere else. Spurs, like other self-respecting modern football clubs, also make much of their outreach to the local community.

The new development would remove the current stadium, no thing of beauty, and would brighten up its dingy surroundings.

It would greatly enhance the space outside a neighbouring school that currently resembles the death zone along the Berlin Wall.

A supermarket, hotel, conference centre, and housing — affordable and otherwise — are all good things for Tottenham.

The club have hired the famous American landscape architect Martha Schwartz to create a "vibrant" and "exceptional" public square and an ice rink is promised in winter.

The ground itself, designed by the stadium specialist KSS, aims to create a rare intimacy between fans and players, even as it increases the current capacity of 35,000 by two-thirds.

At one end, a vast bank of spectators, uninterrupted by corporate boxes, is proposed, with the intention of creating an array of passionate humanity unlike any other English football ground.

It is meant to be the opposite of the chilly cathedral, the Emirates Stadium, that Arsenal have built for themselves.

Externally, the proposed stadium is a silvery, swooping thing, none too subtle and a bit blingy.

There are awkward crunches where the right-angled geometry of its floors and columns meets the curving arch shapes the architects have applied to the exterior.

It is not, in other words, a sophisticated work of architecture, although it is sleeker than most British football grounds and has a certain oomph to it.

But the real issue is how all these elements add up. In the present plans the stadium looks as though it were designed to sit in an open plain, with little recognition of the bits of street and town around it.

At one end the supermarket is a standard blind box; at the other the hotel and housing, designed by Make Architecture, are noisy, jagged objects with juddering rhythms, rising up to 20 storeys above three-storey surroundings. Taken together, it makes for an inchoate whole.

What's needed is architecture that can walk and chew gum at the same time. The stadium should be splendid — and there's no point trying to disguise the fact that it's enormous — but it should also respond to the fact that it's shaping a public place in everyday use on the 340 days a year when there's not a match on.

The hotel and housing present an opportunity to create a transition between the scale of the existing streets and that of the stadium, but instead aim to be expressive icons in their own right.

It's not an easy task but it's possible, and achieving difficult things should be the reason why architects are paid their fees. More than that, it's dramatic encounters like this that make architecture interesting — think, for example, of the way medieval cathedrals rise from narrow streets. Done well, this slab of Tottenham could become an astonishing part of London.

I write this as a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. Having been born in Hastings to a largely football-hating family, I can't claim to be a dyed-in-the-wool fan, but I was drawn to the club by its tradition of finding the most stylish players.

Now, going to matches with my daughter, we have a well-worn joke as the blue struts of the existing stadium come into view. "That's the most beautiful building in London," we say. It isn't, of course.

The point is that, once inside, the look of a stadium becomes almost irrelevant compared with what's happening on the pitch.

Most football fans would watch their team in stadia built out of plastic drain sections and reused scrap metal, which is what, indeed, many of them look like.

But, given the chance to create a wholly new stadium development, why wouldn't you want it to be as classy and skilful as the best players?