History of Terraces in English Football and Their End

On 30 April 1994 a crowd stood on the Spion Kop at Anfield for the last time. The following season the end was a seated stand, and the largest single bank of standing spectators in English football had gone from the fixture list for good. Within a few years the same thing had happened at Highbury, at Old Trafford, at Villa Park, at Elland Road and at every other ground in the top two divisions of the English game.

That change was not a matter of taste. It came out of a Home Office inquiry, a piece of Westminster legislation and a licensing regime run first by the Football Licensing Authority and now by the Sports Grounds Safety Authority. Understanding why English terraces went — and why they are still standing, in their thousands, at grounds in League Two and the National League — means reading the safety rules rather than the nostalgia.

This page covers how terraces were built in England, how they were filled, what went wrong, what the law did about it, and what has come back since under licence. For the modern regulated version of standing, there is a companion page on safe standing in English stadiums; for grounds that vanished altogether rather than being converted, see lost English football grounds.

How an English terrace was actually built

Most of the great English terraces began as spoil. A club acquired a strip of land behind a goal, tipped ash, clinker, builders' rubble or colliery waste onto it, compacted it, and cut steps into the resulting bank. Sleepers from the nearest railway held the treads in place. The Spion Kop at Anfield started this way, and so did dozens of imitators that took the same name after the Boer War battle — the Liverpool Echo's sports editor Ernest Edwards is generally credited with attaching it to the Anfield bank in 1906, and every subsequent Kop in England borrowed from that.

Concrete came later, and unevenly. A club that had money laid proper concrete steps with a consistent riser and tread; a club that did not patched what it had. This is why old photographs of English terracing show such variety in step depth. There was no single specification until the safety legislation of the 1970s imposed one.

Roofing was the next investment, and it changed the sound as much as the comfort. A covered end traps noise. An open bank disperses it. Archibald Leitch, the Glasgow engineer whose work is scattered across England at Goodison Park, Old Trafford, Villa Park, Craven Cottage, Fratton Park and Hillsborough among others, gave the English game its recognisable ground vocabulary — the criss-cross balcony truss, the double-decker with paddock terracing at the front, the covered end behind a goal.

Crush barriers were the last structural element to be taken seriously. They run horizontally across the slope, staggered so that a supporter sliding forward meets one within a short distance, and they exist to break the terrace into manageable blocks of load rather than to pen people in. The Green Guide requires them to be tested and to withstand a specified horizontal force, with spacing calculated from the gradient. Barriers that had corroded at the base, or that had been removed to improve sightlines, were among the recurring findings in English ground inspections through the 1980s.

Radial fences and the pens

The other feature that defined the late English terrace was the radial fence: a barrier running up the slope, dividing an end into separate pens, usually introduced to segregate rival supporters or to break up a large standing area for control purposes. Combined with perimeter fencing at the front — put up through the 1970s to stop pitch invasions — this produced enclosures that could be entered easily and left only with difficulty. That geometry, rather than standing in itself, is what the inquiries kept returning to.

Filling a terrace, and the physics of a crowd that cannot move

A terrace has no allocated places. Supporters arrive, choose a spot, and the density adjusts itself. On an ordinary league afternoon that works: people find room, the crowd breathes, and the whole thing is self-regulating. On a big occasion it does not, because the flow into the ground is controlled by turnstiles and the distribution inside is controlled by nothing at all.

The Green Guide handles this with arithmetic. Available viewing area is measured, a maximum packing density is applied — the guide works to a figure in the order of 47 people per ten square metres — and the result is then reduced by two multipliers: the (P) factor, which reflects the physical condition of the terrace and its barriers, and the (S) factor, which reflects the quality of the safety management. A terrace with sound concrete, tested barriers and a well-run stewarding operation keeps most of its theoretical capacity. One with corroded barriers and no counting system loses a great deal of it.

Before that methodology was enforced, English clubs routinely announced capacities that had never been calculated from anything. Counting was done at the turnstile for the ground as a whole rather than for the pen, which meant a club could sit well inside its overall capacity while one enclosure behind a goal was dangerously overloaded.

The physics is unforgiving. Standing crowds transmit force through contact, and on a slope the force runs downhill. A surge at the back arrives at the front amplified, and the people at the front have a fence in the way.

Getting in, and the habits that went with it

Entry to an English terrace was cash at a turnstile, and the turnstile is the reason so much terrace folklore exists. There was no ticket to lose, no seat to find and no reason to arrive early unless you wanted a particular spot, so the queue formed late and moved in a rush. Clubs read the gate from the turnstile counters after kick-off, which is why attendance figures from the era are counts of admissions rather than of people present.

Small children were passed down over the heads of the crowd to the front, where a strip in front of the first barrier was informally reserved for them, and stewards or police at the perimeter let them sit on the running track or the wall. That practice looks alarming now and was completely routine then. It also tells you something about how the density worked: the front of an English terrace was often the emptiest part until the last ten minutes before kick-off, and then it was the fullest.

Leaving was the other half of it. Exit from a terrace is by the same steps and gangways that everyone came up, and the Green Guide's exit calculations — flow rates through gates, time to clear, the width of every stairway — are as important to a certificated capacity as the barriers are. A terrace that could hold a crowd safely for ninety minutes but could not empty it in the required time had its figure cut accordingly.

1. 1MeasureThe usable viewing area of the terrace is measured in square metres, excluding gangways and unusable strips.
2. 2Apply densityA maximum packing density is applied to that area to give a theoretical holding capacity.
3. 3Physical factorA (P) factor reduces the figure to reflect barrier condition, step condition, gangways and exits.
4. 4Safety factorAn (S) factor reduces it further to reflect stewarding, counting and management competence.
5. 5CertificateThe local authority issues a safety certificate stating the permitted figure, with the SGSA overseeing designated grounds.
6. 6CountEntry to each self-contained area is counted on the day so the certified figure is not exceeded.

The regulatory method used to certify a terrace under the Green Guide, not a calculation for any individual ground.

Burnden Park, Ibrox and the safety laws that came before Hillsborough

English football did not arrive at 1989 without warning. On 9 March 1946, at an FA Cup tie between Bolton Wanderers and Stoke City at Burnden Park, thirty-three people died in a crush on the Railway Embankment. The subsequent inquiry by Moelwyn Hughes recommended licensing of grounds and mechanical counting of admissions. Neither recommendation was acted on with any urgency.

Twenty-five years later, sixty-six people died on Stairway 13 at Ibrox in Glasgow. That disaster produced the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975, which introduced designation and safety certificates issued by local authorities, and the first edition of what became the Green Guide. English grounds above a certain capacity now needed a certificate, and the certificate could specify a capacity that the club did not like.

The 1985 season brought two more. The fire in the main stand at Valley Parade on 11 May 1985 killed fifty-six people at a Bradford City match, and led to the Popplewell inquiry and a hard look at timber structures and the rubbish that accumulated beneath them. Eighteen days later, thirty-nine people died at Heysel before a European Cup final involving Liverpool, and English clubs were removed from European competition.

What the pre-1989 record shows is that the English game already had a legal framework for ground safety and already knew what killed people in crowds. The framework was applied slowly, unevenly, and with a great deal of deference to what clubs said they could afford.

The Taylor Report and the all-seater requirement

On 15 April 1989, ninety-seven people were fatally injured in the central pens of the Leppings Lane end at Hillsborough during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Lord Justice Taylor was appointed to inquire. His interim report appeared in August 1989 and dealt with the immediate causes; his final report, published in January 1990, set out the wider programme.

Taylor's central judgement about standing was narrower than it is usually remembered. He did not argue that standing is inherently lethal. He argued that standing accommodation as English clubs then built, certified and managed it could not be made reliably safe, and that seating solved several problems at once: it fixes the density, it gives every person a known place, it makes counting straightforward, and it removes the incentive to keep pushing forward.

The mechanism was the Football Spectators Act 1989. The Act gave the Secretary of State power to direct that designated grounds admit spectators only to seated accommodation, and the Football Licensing Authority — created by the same Act, and reconstituted as the Sports Grounds Safety Authority in 2011 — enforced it through the licensing regime.

Perimeter fencing went too, which matters and is often forgotten. The fences at the front of English terraces came down or were cut back to a height a person could get over, and gates were required to be manned and openable. That change alone altered the character of an English matchday.

• 1975Safety of Sports Grounds Act
• 1990Taylor final report published
• 1994Last standing on the Anfield Kop

Dates taken from legislation and published inquiry reports; milestones in the regulatory sequence rather than a count of grounds converted.

Which divisions had to convert, and which were let off

The original expectation was that the all-seater requirement would reach the whole Football League. It did not. In 1992 the government accepted that the cost of converting grounds in the third and fourth tiers was disproportionate to the crowds those grounds held, and the requirement was confined to the top two divisions — which by then meant the newly formed Premier League and the First Division that became the Championship.

That decision is the single reason terracing still exists in England. It created a hard line at the second tier and left everything below it alone.

Level	Standing position after the 1992 decision
Premier League	All-seater required at designated grounds
Championship	All-seater required at designated grounds
League One	Terracing permitted
League Two	Terracing permitted
National League and below	Terracing permitted, subject to certification

The line has an obvious consequence: promotion into the Championship triggers conversion. A club coming up from League One with a terraced end is given a period of grace — commonly reported as three seasons — to bring the ground into compliance, and clubs have used that window to build, to move, or in some cases to bounce back down before the deadline bit. The interaction between promotion and ground compliance is one of the quieter costs of going up, and it sits alongside the financial ones covered in what promotion to the Premier League involves.

The great English ends and what they were called

Naming was local and unofficial, and that is precisely why the names stuck. The Spion Kop at Anfield gave its name to Kops at Hillsborough, at Elland Road, at Prenton Park and at grounds far down the pyramid. The Stretford End at Old Trafford took its name from the district behind it. The Holte End at Villa Park is named for Aston Hall's Holte family. The North Bank at Highbury and the Shed at Stamford Bridge described the structure. The Gwladys Street end at Goodison Park is named after the street it backs onto — a terraced street naming a football terrace.

Some names described the building's shortcomings with real affection. West Ham's Chicken Run was a low, narrow, covered strip along one side of the Boleyn Ground, close enough to the pitch that the occupants could be heard by the linesman and by the away winger. The Shelf at White Hart Lane was a standing paddock on the upper tier, an unusual arrangement that gave a raised view without a seat.

A detail worth keeping: when Arsenal demolished the North Bank in 1992 to rebuild it as a seated stand, the club erected a painted mural of a full standing crowd across the open end for the season the work took. Supporters played in front of a picture of themselves. Nothing captures the transition more precisely.

The ends survived the terraces in name. Anfield still has a Kop, Villa Park still has a Holte End, and Old Trafford still has a Stretford End, all of them now seated. The word outlived the concrete.

Where the singing came from

Terrace singing in England is largely a post-war phenomenon that accelerated sharply in the 1960s, and its home was the covered end. Two conditions produced it. A roof reflects sound back into the crowd, so a singer hears the response and joins in rather than feeling exposed. And an unallocated standing area lets the same people gather in the same place week after week, which is how a repertoire forms.

The material came from wherever material comes from. Music-hall tunes, hymns, chart pop rewritten with local words, and after the early 1960s a great deal of Merseybeat. Songs travelled between English grounds within weeks because supporters heard them on away terraces and took them home, which is the same transmission mechanism as folk song.

What seating changed was the geometry of participation rather than the volume. A seated crowd can be loud. What it cannot easily do is move as one, absorb latecomers into the middle of a section, or reorganise itself around whoever is leading the singing that afternoon. The people who start songs on an English terrace tend to occupy a spot near a barrier, and everyone within earshot knows where it is.

Away support kept more of the terrace habit than home support, because away sections are smaller, more self-selecting and — even when seated — frequently stood up anyway. Persistent standing in seated areas became the enforcement headache of the 2000s and 2010s, and it is the direct reason the licensed standing debate reopened. If you are planning a trip to a smaller ground where the away end is still concrete, the practicalities are covered in the English football away days guide.

What conversion cost, and what clubs lost with the capacity

The bill was enormous, and it did not fall entirely on the clubs. The Football Trust, funded substantially by the football pools companies, distributed grants towards ground safety work, and in 1990 the Chancellor reduced pool betting duty specifically to increase the money available for it. English clubs still had to find the rest, and many borrowed heavily against future gate income to do so.

The capacity arithmetic was brutal in a way that surprised people at the time. Converting a terrace to seats does not halve its capacity in every case, but it comes closer than clubs expected, because seats need row spacing, gangways, aisles and legally compliant escape routes that a standing bank did not. An end that held twenty thousand standing might hold rather more than half that seated, and the difference had to be recovered from ticket prices.

Which is the second consequence, and the more lasting one. A smaller ground with higher demand supports higher prices, and English top-flight admission rose steeply through the 1990s. The relationship between capacity, demand and the price of a seat is one of the mechanisms behind modern Premier League ticket prices and behind the shape of matchday revenue at English clubs.

Not every club converted in place. Some looked at a Victorian ground hemmed in by housing, worked out what compliant seating, gangways and modern exits would leave them with, and moved instead. That is the origin of a whole generation of English out-of-town grounds built through the 1990s and 2000s, most of them single-tier bowls on ring-road sites with car parking, which solved the safety certificate and the catering income at the same time. The trade-offs involved are set out in the guide to new stadium builds in English football.

There was a third loss that shows up in no accounts. Terraces were cheap, and cheap admission is how a crowd renews itself. A teenager who could pay at the gate for a place on the Kop had a route in that a season-ticket waiting list does not provide. Several English clubs have spent the last two decades building concession schemes and family stands to reconstruct, deliberately and expensively, what the terrace used to do by accident.

Terracing that survived in the EFL and non-league

Below the Championship, the terrace never went anywhere. Grounds in League One and League Two frequently retain standing behind one or both goals, and the away end at a good many of them is concrete rather than plastic. Kenilworth Road's Oak Road end, reached by a stairway built over a row of terraced houses, is the example every travelling supporter in England has a photograph of.

Further down, terracing is the default rather than the exception. National League grounds are certificated by their local authorities in the same way, with the same Green Guide methodology applied at a smaller scale, and the licensing conversation is about barrier testing and gangway width rather than about whether standing is permitted at all.

Ground grading is the constraint that shapes non-league standing. Each step of the pyramid sets minimum requirements for covered accommodation, seated places, floodlighting and facilities, and a club chasing promotion has to meet the grade for the division above by a fixed deadline. That produces the very English sight of a small club building a modest seated stand alongside a much larger terrace, purely to satisfy a seat count. The tiers and their requirements are set out in how the non-league steps work.

Terraces at this level do things that big grounds cannot. You can walk round at half-time. You can stand behind the goal your team is attacking and change ends at the interval. You are close enough to hear the players, which is either the great attraction of non-league football or the reason people stop swearing when children are nearby.

1. 1Non-leagueTerracing is permitted at every step, with grading rules setting minimum covered and seated places for each division.
2. 2League Two and League OneTerracing remains permitted; the ground needs a valid safety certificate and nothing more on standing.
3. 3Promotion to the ChampionshipThe all-seater obligation bites, and the club enters a limited period of grace to comply.
4. 4Conversion or relocationThe club either seats its terraces within the existing footprint or builds elsewhere, having priced both.
5. 5Licensed standingOnce all-seater, the club may apply separately to install rail seating and operate a designated standing area.

The compliance sequence a club faces on the way up; the grace period and grading thresholds are set by the competition and the certifying authority, not fixed nationally.

Licensed standing and how much of the terrace it brings back

Rail seating is the compromise. Each place has a seat that can be locked in the upright position and a waist-height rail in front of it, so a supporter has an allocated position, something to hold, and a barrier that arrests forward movement. The density is that of a seated area rather than that of an old terrace, which is the whole point: capacity does not increase, and the person in row twelve is in row twelve whether standing or sitting.

The route back was cautious. After sustained pressure over persistent standing, the government and the Sports Grounds Safety Authority ran a licensed standing programme in which a small group of clubs — Cardiff City, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur among the first of them — operated designated standing areas under monitoring from the start of 2022, before eligibility was widened to other clubs in the top two divisions that met the criteria. Installation alone is not enough; a club needs its safety certificate amended and its stewarding plan to match.

Whether this is a revival of terrace culture is a fair argument to have, and the honest answer is that it revives part of it. The noise and the freedom to stand come back. The self-organising crowd does not, because everyone still holds a ticket for a specific place.

I would argue the more important effect is a safety one rather than a cultural one. Persistent standing in a conventional seated row is genuinely hazardous — there is nothing in front of you but the back of a plastic seat — and rail seating converts an unmanaged behaviour into a certificated one. The full mechanics, including how a club applies and what the SGSA requires, are covered in the safe standing guide.

Photographs, programmes and the terrace archive

The visual record of English terracing is thinner than it should be, because for most of the period nobody was photographing the crowd. Press photographers pointed their cameras at the pitch. What survives of the Kop, the Stretford End and the Fulwell End is largely incidental — background in a goalmouth shot, a wide establishing frame, an amateur snap from the opposite end.

Serious collections do exist. Club museums at several English grounds hold turnstile mechanisms, barrier sections, enamel signage and terrace ephemera, and the National Football Museum in Manchester holds material from across the English game. Local newspaper archives and county record offices are frequently better sources than the clubs themselves, particularly for grounds that closed.

Printed material is the collector's route in. Matchday programmes carry ground plans, admission prices by enclosure, and the small print about which turnstiles served which end — details that nothing else records. A 1970s programme will tell you exactly what it cost to stand on a particular terrace and what it cost to sit, which makes it a primary source for the pricing story. That world has its own economics, set out in the guide to matchday programmes in English football.

Tickets, turnstile counterfoils and enamelled ground signs all trade. So do the barriers themselves: several English clubs sold sections of crush barrier and lengths of terracing when ends were demolished, and those pieces now sit in front rooms across the country.

Standing on concrete in England today

You can still do it, and you do not have to go far. A Saturday in League Two or a Tuesday night in the National League will put you on a covered concrete terrace behind a goal for a fraction of top-flight admission, and the ground will very often be the one the club has occupied since before the First World War.

A few practical points for anyone going deliberately. Check the away end's designation before travelling, because a club may have converted since you last went. Arrive earlier than you would at a seated ground, since a terrace fills from the middle outwards and the spot you want goes first. Expect to be moved by stewards if you drift across a segregation line. And accept that a covered terrace in an English February is colder than any seat, which is a fact about the country rather than about the architecture.

Ground-hoppers have built a whole practice around this, working through the pyramid and recording each ground before it changes. The method, and how to plan a route around fixture congestion, is covered in the ground hopping guide. Broader context on the English game sits on the England hub and in the football section.

What is worth saying plainly at the end of all this is that the terrace was never simply taken away from English supporters. It was removed at the top of the game, by law, after an inquiry into ninety-seven deaths, and it was left in place everywhere else. Both halves of that sentence are true, and English football has spent more than thirty years arguing about the balance between them.