The Final Salute

Arsenal Football Club's last season at Highbury
12 January 2006 – 31 December 2006

For 93 years Arsenal Stadium in Highbury has been home to Arsenal Football Club, and 2006 will see its last season there before taking up residence in the new Emirates Stadium.

Platform for Art has collaborated with Arsenal Football Club and Greenwich Mural Workshop to produce a mural – The Final Salute – which celebrates the passionate memories and proud local community involvement with and ownership of Arsenal’s historic residence at Highbury. This mural will be situated along the passageway to the ticket office at Arsenal Station.

Although the finished work briefly references both Arsenal’s previous home in Woolwich and the new Emirates Stadium, the main focus of the mural will be its history at Highbury. All three collaborators have engaged and consulted with the local community, London Underground staff and Arsenal players and fans in the design of this mural. Photographic and other relevant material on the football club’s history has been gathered and selected from fans and Arsenal’s own museum to contribute to the completed work.

A series of workshops has produced vibrant and exciting imagery to add to the historic archive material and this has all been digitally arranged and fused into one long narrative composition that seamlessly traces the story of this outstanding, historic and much-loved football club.

Arsenal Football Club (AFC) is an internationally renowned football team that has been based at Highbury for 93 years. Highbury’s local underground station Gillespie Road was renamed Arsenal on 5 November 1932 after a campaign by Herbet Chapman. Arsenal celebrates its final season at Highbury this season (August 2005–May 2006) before its move to Emirates Stadium in Ashburton Grove.

Greenwich Mural Workshop is a company with 29 years’ experience of creating site-specific public murals. It has recruited a group of specialist artists with particular skill in digital and photographic media to lead the workshops and compose the imagery for the mural.

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Visiting Information

Artworks for this project are available to visit at the following stations. Where more detailed visiting information is available, page links have been included in the list below.