"Colchester United, Northampton Town, Stoke City, Swansea City: outsiders have to take a detour to visit the town. If you're looking for the stadium and come across something interesting, you've got lost.

"It seems as if no club in England these days can build a stadium without the muscle of a major supermarket chain who use the emotional clout of football as a Trojan horse to win planning permission and part-fund the project. So it's not a shock that many new grounds are functional boxes that don't look much different from supermarkets.

With little incentive to be original they are often as bland as their surroundings. And what's chiefly being improved and regenerated: wasteland or the bank balances of landowners and property developers?"

In Episode Ninety of the Blizzard Podcast we look back at "Location,. Location, Location" by Tom Dart, first published in Issue Six in 2012.

Read the full article here: https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/location-location-location

New, clean, standardised and sterilised, these arenas suit football's growing sense of itself as a family entertainment product. This seems to owe much to the high production values of the American major leagues, where sport is a spectacle, slickly marketed and brand aware, doing as much as it can to provide reliable fun around the inherently variable quality of the actual matches.

But England's present and future is already America's past. While England is copying the suburban American sporting model, city-centre venues are experiencing a renaissance in the US: attractive and highly-visible redevelopment catalysts that ensure downtowns remain a hub of activity after office hours.

Issue Six, like all issues of the Blizzard, is available for £12 plus postage on www.theblizzard.co.uk. Since we’ve relaunched the website, all our articles, including this one, are available to read for free. Non-subscribers get 3 free articles a month, while subscribers have unlimited advert-free browsing, as well as access to digital downloads of all our issues in eBook formats.

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