Celebrating 'authentic football culture' in photos of former stadium

In April 2005 Coventry City played their final match at Highfield Road, which had been the club's home for 106 years.

The Sky Blues marked the occasion with a 6-2 Championship victory over Derby County, a pitch invasion and a rendition of Play up Sky Blues led by Jimmy Hill.

Soon after, the ground - the first all-seater stadium in English football - was closed, demolished and redeveloped for housing.

Previously unseen photographs showing the stadium's final years, taken by city photographer Jason Scott Tilley, feature in a new book: Highfield Road 1999-05.

They capture the "people, spaces and rituals that shaped match days, long before the ground was erased," said Matt Lidbury from publisher Lower Block.

"It never was just about the football," said the photographer.

"It was about the walk to the ground through crowded streets, the smell of burned onions cooking in dodgy burger vans, finishing your pint quickly just before kick-off, the same bums sitting in their favourite seats all season long, and the old man selling The Pink on the streets straight after the game."

Growing up close enough to the ground to hear the roar of the crowd carry across the city on Saturday afternoons, Tilley was taken to his first game by his father in 1976, at the age of eight.

"It was then, for better or worse, I became a Coventry City fan," he said.

In the early days, his dad, Roy, would "squeeze us both through the turnstiles and pay for one," he recounts.

"The blokes at the turnstiles were great with us."

He now enjoys taking his own 14-year-old son Max to games, as the team continues to dominate the Championship.

"Although it's getting more and more difficult to get tickets."

As a teenager Tilley began working for the Coventry Evening Telegraph as a photographer, also contributing to Saturday sports paper The Pink.

"Because I had a press pass my dad would get into the after-game press conferences and have a complimentary whisky. He really liked that," he explained.

"As a photographer we were allowed to sit on the pitch in those days. We were so close to the action that Cyrille Regis once landed on me, and he apologised - he was a real gentleman."

Images in the book were a "fantastic balance of the old stadium as well as the streets around the ground, and some of those faces that would have frequented those streets," said the publisher.

"It's authentic football culture," he added.

"Lower Block is all about documenting, curating and celebrating football through great photography."

The images were taken in the days "before corporate television and disgusting salaries took hold," added Tilley.

"When football was as much about a sense of community that involved the players and the fans and, very importantly, about loyalty.

"I have on occasion been back to the area of land where the ground once stood," he added.

"I knew it would be a mistake - a huge one. They destroyed something great."

Highfield Road 1999-05 is published by Lower Block.

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