At least two of the stands down the road are listing.
Is there any reason why the Trinity Road wasn’t listed as a building of historical interest? Are there any stands in the football league that can boast such a listing? My only recollection of any commitment to maintaining the fabric of Trinity Road stand is hazy to say the least but I am sure that Ansell did give some assurances, but as DW has said they were probably subject to interpretation. The only thing I did find was an article written by Mac in When Saturday Comes back in 2001. Whatever, it was an act of vandalism which I will never forgive HDE for.
Quote from: Virgil Caine on March 07, 2021, 09:11:01 AMIs there any reason why the Trinity Road wasn’t listed as a building of historical interest? Are there any stands in the football league that can boast such a listing? My only recollection of any commitment to maintaining the fabric of Trinity Road stand is hazy to say the least but I am sure that Ansell did give some assurances, but as DW has said they were probably subject to interpretation. The only thing I did find was an article written by Mac in When Saturday Comes back in 2001. Whatever, it was an act of vandalism which I will never forgive HDE for. It couldn't be listed because it had been altered too much.
The demolition of the old Trinity very neatly illustrates DE’s corner shop mentality. A long-term plan would’ve been necessary to retain it, conceived even before the Holte End and Witton Lane stands were redeveloped, in order to compensate for the lower capacity and reduced facilities when compared to a complete new build. Mr Aston Villa didn’t have this vision, he approached each stand as a stand-alone project, one after the other.I enjoyed listening to Gary Naylor contextualising Aston Villa’s early 80s success in the brilliant Nessun Dorma podcast, touching on the London and Manchester press, and the role of Villa Park in the collective football consciousness. I always think that Birmingham has a strange relationship with its past, and doesn’t value its own history enough. Perhaps the fact that Manzoni’s destruction of parts of the historic city was intended to usher in a progressive future, but instead accompanied economic downturn, is in some way to blame. You might think that either (like Manzoni) there wasn’t anything valuable to lose, or (like his opponents) that much of what was valuable had been lost. Villa Park is almost a microcosm of this, with HDE in the Manzoni role.
You couldn't retain it. It was small and pokey with restricted views owing to the posts. It had a lovely facade, but given how small it was, it would have been impossible to keep it in the footprint of a significantly larger stand.It would have been nice to have copied the exterior of the Holte and built something like that in homage, with stained glass perhaps on the first level etc.What was built took Lerner to finish mind, so there's no doubt HDE did it on the cheap.
Seems senseless to me to compromise the foot print of your new build to save an aesthetic that you would have been able to replicate on probably a much grander scale. The area around the McGregor statue now for example, where the actual entrance is would have allowed something similar. When you're inside to go up into the executive boxes, there's a double flight of stairs, so it would have been very similar, albeit bigger, to have built a stair case externally leading to the first floor.