A walk to remember..around football stadiums in London

It is a love so deep that it is hard to recognize him at first sight. That mixture between imperial and pop leads and conquers the traveller in London and manages to distract you from what really attract Londoners: shopping, museums, or Royal family. The capital of the country that invented soccer/football protects the visitor with tourist attractions hiding his reverential respect for football and its history. Stadiums with life, former fields modernized wisely, give their neighbourhoods with a strong personality, in an intimate style to understand a passion. The British Isles breathe a culture and a respect for tradition around these unpublished secular temples anywhere else in the world, and the well-established football pitches of the capital are refusing to survive as skeletons of multitudes of Benedetti. We chose a national stadium and four other club fields designed by a famous architectm from the 19th century to enjoy the hidden love of London.

WEMBLEY The Cathedral with Ikea From the nearby campus of the University of Westminster, Wembley is the tick, the rainbow. But, actually the Cathedral of English football has become the industrial estate of football, with goals from Ikea. Isolated by the train tracks, this was never a neighborhood with solera, but those two towers of 1923, inaugurated by King George V gave canonical luster to a stadium where the demolition of the Twin Towers gave way to the bow of the controversial project by Norman Foster in 2007. Yes still the 39 hitchcockianos steps of grass to the box reserved for champions ( Barça rose them ) and visitors of the recommended tour of Wembley (15 pounds ), where the English cult of football focuses on a piece of wood: the crossbar of the phantom goal which decided the world of 1966, the only one that the inventors of football have won.

CRAVEN COTTAGE A cottage on the Thames Even the statue of Michael Jackson that Mohamed Al Fayed ( the owner of Fulham FC, of the Empire Harrods and father of Dodi, boyfriend of Lady Di ) just erected here, this is the most charming stadium of the United Kingdom, perhaps in the world. You should reach Craven Cottage by underground/tube, the artistic station of Putney Bridge, and from there, on a tour of the privileged by the River, up to this stadium of Edwardian stylish brick designed and surviving as it was built in 1905 by Scotsman Archibald Leitch, architect of stadiums who left his mark throughout the country since the end of the 19th century until his death in 1939. The route leads through Bishops Park, one of these parks whose discovery compensates for the trip. Before entering the field, it's nice to stop to ask for the team in Hurlingham, the bookshop of lance de Ray, the most educated fan in the neighborhood. Bishop Park is standing next to the Thames, to the shore where the rowing clubs warn us that in addition to football, this country has the famous boat race Cambridge vs. Oxford universities. The statue of Johnny Haynes, footballer of small Fulham, welcomes us and compensates for the King's of pop. Craven Cottage is a monument thanks to the small Neo Tudor cottage Stevenage Road, in a corner of this stadium of human dimension, almost organic, in a hesitation of residential area, Park and river. A model house built when football broke out at the beginning of the 20th century, which is still there, ensuring the essence of football, at least in this corner of the world.

STAMFORD BRIDGE Balonazos with 'glamour' The luxurious and posh London that starts from Knightsbridge and South Kensington, has his extension again rich along Fulham Road, to lead at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea Cubist Stadium, a theme park as Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich desired. He is the owner of the historically most stylish club of the country, now become the Versace of football. Pubs, restaurants, a hotel and even a megastore complete this blue village that breaks the Coquette stamp of an elegant area, but with lneighborhood life, which despite the flirtations with the tacky respect the atmosphere of the past: here even the walls, like the of the Shed End, old terrace of the stadium that Archibald LeitchIt projected, has his plate, a blue one, of course.

WHITE HEART LANE Multicultural steel Without football, this is a border area, warehouse of spare parts, halfway between Seven Sisters - commercial center of a neighborhood that changed from proletarian into multicultural in the 1960s - and nothing. The excuse to keep on climbing Tottenham High Road is that stadium broke into pieces, made of modern metal-coat. It is the closest thing to go to football 40 years ago. Of the old brewery which had here, there are today pubs, packed on match day, and the Golden Cockerel that dominates the West Gallery. A pint at Rudolph's, before the gate of the club that the Jews of London created, and taste the football of long ago.

FROM HIGHBURY TO THE EMIRATES Northern pride Herbert Chapman revolutionized football with WM tactics, but he also put football on the map. Literally. Arsenal, the club that managed to name this working area of North London subway station in 1932, moved to a new stadium in 2006, but here nobody thought of demolishing the old Highbury, an oasis between terraced houses. Not only their flirty four grandstands (and the façade) were respected, but that they have built, taking advantage of ornaments art deco Leitch, luxury apartments with a passable inner garden where there was the grass on a unique restoration, example of love for football and the recycling of buildings. The weight of history is only 200 meters away, where it stands, modern and disproportionated, the Emirates Stadium, surrounded by avenues of train and new flats in a neighborhood, Islington, which has become bourgeois of proletarian, and where it is not compulsory to be a match day to cross with Nick Hornby, writer who did understand the world that the love of football can also be culture.