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Stuart Roy Clarke is an English documentary photographer, author, exhibition-artist, speaker. His major works include The Homes of Football^[1] and Cumbria Surrounded^[2] and Glastonbury All Mine^[3].

After several years of working for local newspapers in Hertfordshire and as a freelance photographer for the magazine Time Out in London, Clarke went to live in The Lake District, where he began The Homes of Football in 1990.^{[1][failed verification]}

The football opus,^{[clarification needed]} documenting the changing face of the game, was self-funded initially but then evolved into a touring exhibition hired by various municipalities and shown in 80 museums and art galleries over a 15-year period. In 1997 Clarke also opened a permanent gallery to his football work in Ambleside, in the English Lake District. The gallery closed in 2012.^{[4][failed verification]}

• 1991: The Homes of Football, Burnley Towneley Hall Art Gallery, Barrow Forum 28 Gallery, Leeds City Museum
• 1992: The Homes of Football, Stoke Museum & Art Gallery, Derby Metro Gallery, Birkenhead Williamson Museum & Art Gallery, Coventry Herbert Museum & Art Gallery, Bath F-Stop Gallery, Wigan History Shop Museum, Hove Museum & Art Gallery, Bournemouth Russell Cotes Museum & Art Gallery, Scunthorpe Museum & Art Gallery
• 1993: The Homes of Football, Maidstone Library Gallery, Bilston Museum & Art Gallery, Aylesbury County Museum, Durham DLI Art Gallery, Fulham Library Gallery, Mansfield Museum & Art Gallery, Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Westminster House of Commons (one day only), Hitchin Museum & Art Gallery, Middlesbrough Art Gallery, Southend Focal Point Gallery, Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery, Guernsey Museum & Art Gallery, Salford Museum & Art Gallery, Milton Keynes Exhibition Gallery
• 1994: The Homes of Football, High Wycombe Guildhall, Grimsby Heritage Centre, Swansea Industrial Museum, Belfast Ulster Museum, Carlisle Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery
• 1995: The Homes of Football, Bradford Industrial Museum, Warrington Museum & Art Gallery
• 1996: The Homes of Football, Reading Museum & Art Gallery, Edinburgh City Arts Centre, Liverpool Museum of Liverpool Life, Coatbridge Summerlee Heritage Park
• 1997: The Homes of Football, Arbroath Art Gallery, Forfar Methen Art Gallery, Paisley Museum & Art Gallery, Prescot Museum, Barnsley Cooper Gallery, Stockport Art Gallery
• 1998: The Homes of Football, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Kilmarnock Dick Institute, Yorkshire York Museum, Wrexham Arts Centre, Falkirk Callendar House, Birmingham Mac
• 1999: The Homes of Football, Holyhead Arts Centre, Dunfermline Pittencrief Museum, Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter Museum & Art Gallery, Cheltenham Museum, Dumfries Museum & Art Gallery, Stranraer Museum, Kirkcudbright Museum, Lincoln Usher Gallery, Luton Artezium, London RIBA
• 2000: The Homes of Football, Gillingham Library, Strood Library, Solihull Arts Complex, Oldham Museum & Art Gallery, Darlington Art Gallery, Hull Ferens Art Gallery, Watford Museum, Wakefield Art Gallery
• 2001: The Homes of Football, Leamington Spa Museum, Sheffield Galleries, Warrington Museum
• 2002: The Homes of Football, Leicester Museum, South Shields Museum, Coventry Herbert Art Gallery, Leeds Corn Exchange, Bolton Museum & Art Gallery
• 2003: The Homes of Football, Cardiff St.David's Hall, Sunderland Art Gallery, Salford Lowry Outlet, Reading Museum & Art Gallery, Shrewsbury Museum
• 2004: The Homes of Football / Football in our Time, Gateshead Library, Lisbon University Portugal, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich Forum
• 2012: The Homes of Football, National Football Museum, Manchester
• 2013: The Homes of Football / True Colours, National Football Museum, Manchester
• 2014: The Homes of Football / Northern League 125, National Football Museum, Manchester
• 2018 - 2019 The Game, National Football Museum, Manchester^[5][6]
• 2021 Football During Lockdown, with Amazon Prime, Manchester Cathedral Gardens
• 2024 The Homes of Football Projected Large, The Printworks, Manchester^[7]

• 1997–2011: The Homes of Football at Ambleside: three-storey Museum^[8]
• 2001–2007: Homes of Football: At The Football Association HQ London^{[citation needed]}
• 2014–2019: The Homes of Football: In the Courtyard of FA Centre of Excellence, St George's Park National Football Centre^{[citation needed]}

Football commentator John Motson called the work "a unique and wonderful collection of football scenes. Stuart Clarke puts a new perspective on the game". Former player and manager Bryan Robson said that "Stuart Clarke has brought to life the international game of football with a series of outstanding, innovative and often witty photographs". Former Prime Minister and Newcastle United F.C. supporter Tony Blair called the Homes of Football "a must for any football fan. It is an excellent collection of outstanding photographs which truly capture the passion of the game. It really is a gem".^[9]

• The Homes of Football (1996)
• Passion of A Nation (1999), Little Brown & Co
• More Than A Game (2001), Random House
• Football In Our Time (2003), Mainstream
• England The Light (2004), Giant Step
• Scenes From A British Summer Country Pop Music Festival (2010), SRC
• Cumbria Surrounded (Somewhere Across A Promised Land) (2010), SRC
• The Cradle of The Game (2010), SRC
• The Homes of Football / Where the Heart Is (2013), Bluecoat
• Britische Fussballkultur in Den 90er Jahren (2014), Panorama
• The Game (2018), Bluecoat^[10]
• The Game Revisited (2019), Bluecoat^[11]
• The Game (2020), Relegation Press^[12]
• Football During Lockdown (2021), Amazon Prime Sports
• Glastonbury All Mine (2023), Relegation Press^[3]

• A Common Passion (1996), ITV written and presented by Stuart Clarke
• Splendid Isolation (2000), ITV written and presented by Stuart Clarke
• The Homes of Football / Stuart Roy Clarke (2012), Northern Stars / National Football Museum / British Sea Power
• The Homes of Football / Inside Out (2013), BBC1
• The Homes of Football / True Colours (2013), FIFA Football Mundial
• Stuart Roy Clarke / Sport in Focus (2014), BT Sport^[13]
• Christmas University Challenge (2018) / ITV Studios, BBC2^[14]
• German World Cup Summer Recalled (2025), 11mm Football Film Festival Berlin^[15]

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Football In Wind And Rain (The Making Of The British Game), John Williams

Source:^[16][17]

The young Stuart Roy Clarke soon decided that much more interesting than events on the pitch at Vicarage Road was the strange stadium architecture and the antics and characters present in football crowds. He began to take his camera to games to make his own extraordinary photographic record of the menagerie of Britain's varied clans of football supporters, and of the mainly eyesore stadiums to which they seemed so deeply and mysteriously attached. He was already on what was to become his Homes of Football ^[1]journey, recording and reporting on British football stadium life from the ground level up. Relying always on single-shot colour film and employing no fancy 'improving' technology, he captured what was, by then, a rapidly changing fan and stadium terrain. Clarke was able to produce a vital visual record of the before-and-after impact of Hillsborough and the Premier League era on stadium architecture and culture.^[16]

His commission, via The Football Trust (the public body then charged with distributing small public grants for the national stadium modernisation programme in Britain) was to chart the impact of this public investment, including the transformation of the national stock of elite British football grounds. Few major clubs at that time kept detailed historical records or housed even amateur historians; none had convincing museums. Times have changed since. Certainly, very few British football clubs were likely, faithfully, to record their own immediate past at this critical juncture or to chart, through photography or other means, the bumpy road into this challenging new future.^[16]

Clarke was now carefully recording the key features of historic British football stadiums before their modernisation or potential destruction; he was on hand to report on the demolition of some great, historic, British sporting buildings. He had also developed a keen eye for capturing historic local sporting spaces in decline: sagging stadium storage sheds or merchandise shops; shabby, but distinctive, ticket offices; grisly food outlets; strange toilet facilities; stretches of weed-infested terracing. He was skilled at seeing the abstract beauty of vivid newly painted stadium walls and stairwells. These were buildings, passageways and spaces that most fans might only see in passing, or might regard as barely functional eyesores, some of them awaiting likely (and probably deserved) demolition. Clarke's photographs somehow revealed their wider cultural value and historic significance as if they should be preserved at all costs, perhaps even listed as national monuments. He was becoming the visual record keeper of the sport, its homes and its people. And all at a critical moment of convulsive change.^[16]

Clarke went on to develop a remarkable visual map, a portfolio of photographs of fans and places, with supporters, volunteers and workers often captured at lesser outposts.^[16]

Certainly, his images of British football culture and venues in a period of rapid change in the early 1990s are routinely poignant, frequently humorous and typically respectful of both places and his human subjects. As well as stadiums and fans, there are also careful studies here of mainly lower-level, otherwise 'hidden' club employees and service workers: bouffant tea ladies, spectacular young burger flippers, laid-back match stewards, insistent club programme sellers. His interest as a chronicler of a sport in deep transformative change was never in the occupational lifestyles of the elite players, or even in the spectacular youth fan subcultures of the stadium. This highly visible inversion of the traditional football hierarchies - the role of workers and ordinary tans highlighted and represented over those of owners, directors and players - is central to the ethos of Stuart Roy Clarke's wider football project.^[16]

The Story Of Football in 100 Objects, National Football Museum

Source:^[18][19]

Football photography can capture great goals and wonderful achievements, but images can often be more powerful when they show the crowd, or general football scenes. During the 1990s and 2000s, photographer Stuart Roy Clarke attended games looking for moments to capture. His images often show the culture of football in a way that regular matchday photographers did not at the time. The image shown here (and at St.George's Park, with Clarke stood before it) came from a Sunderland-Coventry game in 1996 and captures a fleeting moment when the anticipation of what could happen can be seen all over the faces of the Sunderland fans behind the fences at Roker Park.^[18]

This image is a wonderful example of Clarke's passion for making the ordinary special. No one in the photograph is posing, or seemingly aware of being photographed. They are engrossed in the game and Clarke has captured a moment all fans can recognise.^[18]

Over time the significance of this image, and the rest of Clarke's work, has increased.^[18]

This photograph is part of Stuart Roy Clarke's The Homes of Football series. These images were taken on a Bronica camera with a standard lens and were not cropped, with his first photo in the series being of four boys at Clydebank's Kilbowie Park in 1989 (also shown). Like Roker Park, this is another ground that has since been demolished. Other grounds, such as Maine Road, were also captured in their final days by Clarke.^[18]

• Clarke website
• HomesOfFootball website

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