There is something about the kingdom of London N5, the postcode of wealth, privilege and chattering classes. Around Highbury Barn, media glitterati clutch their Guardians and film scripts as they scamper towards Highbury and Islington station on their way to a pitch meeting for some stupid advertising campaign.
And you ask: “What, in God’s name is a football team doing here?” Or, more pertinently, what are Arsenal doing here? They started out as Woolwich Arsenal, an area of south London so geographically, spiritually and economically remote from N5, it could be in a different country. But that’s Arsenal for you – the property speculators of football got lucky, moving to Highbury in 1913 with a crystal ball which showed them how N5 and N1 would be transformed from slums into the most expensive and trendy areas of London.

Dear reader, it may not surprise you from the above introduction, that I hate Arsenal. I hate their success, I hate their smug fans, many of whom have jumped on the bandwagon to be seen but not heard, I hate the way they play the beautiful game – from Lee Dixon to Emmanuel Petit, from Patrick Vieira to Jens Lehmann – the nasty and aggressive edge to intimidate opponents.

But most of all, I hate Highbury, the new-old stadium and its concrete adopted son named Emirates down the road. If anything sums up the Arsenal fan it is Nick Hornby, who was born and brought up in deepest Surrey but somehow latched onto Arsenal and has made a savvy media career out of writing about the club and the people who live in the area.

Arsenal represent the antithesis of football. Which other clubs would feel good about playing the working class game in a square mile where the value of the houses is a cool £700,000 minimum.
And when the team was forced to move from Highbury, for no other reason than to get more bums on seats (sic), where do they decide to move? Not to a site away from the inner city, as did Sunderland, Derby, Bolton, Southampton, Leicester, Wigan and countless other teams who have relocated. No, that’s not good enough for Arsenal. They had to move down the road, to a site no more than five minutes walk from Highbury. But what about local residents and businesses? Maybe they have earned the right to a little peace and quiet after nearly one hundred years of match-day hassle. Maybe living next to the Holloway Road (the mega-busy link between north and south London) is hard enough without sixty five thousand fans clogging up the streets and public transport system every two weeks.

Such minor irrelevancies did not deter the Arsenal juggernaut in bulldozing its way through planning processes and removing businesses from Drayton Park to make way for the concrete and steel structure, the plastic seats and the rubbery hamburgers. The Emirates Stadium, a soulless monster, which has incurred the wrath of those rich media types (“the old Highbury was at least architecturally impressive with its Art Deco stands, but this thing is so bland”), is inaccessible.
Its virginity was lost in the Arsenal-Ajax Dennis Bergkamp testimonial. The car park under the stadium was, of course, never built so the square mile around the stadium was a cacophony of 4x4 car horns as the middle classes strived in vain to get their beautiful children to drama or ballet class. And if fans don’t come by car, they can always use the four tube stations close to the ground….can’t they? Er, yes and no. Holloway Road and Finsbury Park will only be open to let people out, and coaches for the away fans are being housed in the Michael Sobell sports centre car park, the size of a postage stamp hosting around 50 buses. Nice logistics.

So, on the day of the first game, I was coming home from work and had to make my usual change from tube to bus at Finsbury Park. Two hours after the game I arrived at Finsbury Park and was prevented from leaving the station by the main entrance. I was sent on a trek similar to the Inca Trail as the station was still coming to terms with how to fit 60,000 people into a small area of London. I still had a smile on my face as I imagined the team and Monsieur Wenger displaying their Champions League losers' medals to the 30,000 people in the stadium, as the other 30,000 ticket holders did battle with the middle class 4x4s in the streets of N5.