The 1980s began eight months early. On 4 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher arrived at Downing Street, fumbling the spirit of St Francis of Assisi and promising to fix a broken nation with the husbandry of a grocer’s daughter. In the decade that followed, she defeated and embraced South American dictators, broke Britain’s most powerful unions, and went toe to toe with the IRA. But even Margaret Thatcher was powerless to write the epitaph for the decade that was unquestionably hers, and which would unravel as it began, eight months early.

On 15 April 1989, 96 people were fatally injured on a football terrace at an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield. The Hillsborough disaster was broadcast live on the BBC; it left millions of people in shock, and English football in ruins. In the weeks that followed, Britain embarked on an unprecedented period of soul-searching over its national sport.

The bare facts were appalling: 79 of the dead were aged 30 or younger; 37 were teenagers; the youngest was a ten-year-old boy. These, overwhelmingly, were Thatcher’s children. Many of them died, on that sunny spring day, covered in their own excrement and urine. The coroner at the original inquests recorded that most had died of traumatic or crush asphyxia. Many spent their last moments throwing up, or crying. Some were trampled beneath dozens of pairs of designer trainers, worn by people who were trying desperately to escape, and trying desperately not to stand on their heads. Others made it onto a faded football pitch, only to die on an advertising hoarding.

On the evening of the disaster, as bereaved relatives began their unimaginable journey to Sheffield, journalists at a press conference at South Yorkshire Police headquarters now asked the question on the lips of most people in Britain that Saturday night: ‘Who was responsible for this?’

In 2009, the country was asking that question again. Twenty years after the biggest disaster in British sport, much of the public were still in the dark about what really happened at Hillsborough. But in March and April 2009, as the 20th anniversary approached, survivors, the bereaved and sympathetic journalists took to the airwaves, the press and the internet to demand the truth. Such was the outcry, the Labour government set up the Hillsborough Independent Panel, a nine-strong committee charged with reviewing all of the remaining documented evidence on the disaster. While the recent inquests in Warrington have delivered the ultimate verdict on the tragedy (and are considered in depth in Chapter 12), this was the moment of truth.

For fully two decades, much of the ‘wisdom’ around Hillsborough had held that it was an accident. Even if it wasn’t, then it was inevitable: fans were just like that. Stadiums were like that. Football, in the 1980s, was like that. But Hillsborough was not an accident, and it was not inevitable. Indeed, so many decisions throughout the decade conspired to cause the disaster that, according to the Hillsborough Independent Panel, the crush in 1989 was ‘foreseeable’.

If there was unwillingness on the part of the public to acknowledge what really went on at Hillsborough, it was seldom more apparent than at the stadium itself. For 20 years, many Sheffield Wednesday supporters remained aggrieved that their home ground was synonymous with such an appalling tragedy. Some campaigned to have the stadium renamed Owlerton, its name until 1914. Others would maintain that the disaster was nothing to do with their unfortunate club, referring to it still as ‘the Liverpool fans disaster’. But, in 1989, Hillsborough was in a wretched condition. As the Hillsborough Independent Panel reported, the safety of supporters admitted onto the Leppings Lane was ‘compromised at every level’.

Supporters had first to pass through an insufficient number of turnstiles, which were also too slow, leading to bottlenecks at the outer gates. Then, access to the Leppings Lane terrace was poorly signposted. The only entrance to pens 3 and 4, behind the goal, was via a tunnel built on a one in six downward gradient: this failed to meet the safety recommendations in the Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds (aka the Green Guide). So too did the seven gates in the perimeter fence of the terrace, which were the only means of emergency egress onto the pitch – they were too narrow, and had given cause for concern within the fire service. And the configuration of crush barriers in pen 3 left a lengthy, uninterrupted diagonal channel, which allowed substantial crowd movements to go unchecked.

Part of the reason the danger went unnoticed by Sheffield Wednesday’s own supporters was that the central pens in the Leppings Lane terrace were reserved for away supporters. Wednesday spent the first four seasons of the decade in the Second Division, and rarely would the Leppings Lane be full. Even after they were promoted to the top flight in 1984/5, only Man Utd, Everton and Liverpool brought a sizeable away support (Wednesday wouldn’t play their city rivals, Sheffield Utd, until the autumn of 1989). But on the three occasions on which Hillsborough hosted an FA Cup semi-final between 1981–88, with near-capacity crowds, there were problems.

In 1988, John Aldridge scored a smart volley to give Liverpool a 2–1 win over Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough and book their place in the Cup Final. Millions of Match of the Day viewers saw the goal, but hundreds of Liverpool fans on the Leppings Lane, barely 20 feet away, did not. The ball came over from the left wing, Aldridge’s right foot connected, and then … All they saw were the fans in front of them leap up, and they heard a roar around the ground. Some experienced a frightening crush in pens 3 and 4, behind the goal. As they made their way out of Hillsborough, many were heard to say: ‘There’s something wrong with that terrace. The view’s terrible.’

This is not an apocryphal story: I was one of those supporters. In the weeks that followed, Liverpool fans wrote to Peter Robinson, the club’s chief executive, to complain about the poor state of the terrace. Another fan wrote to the FA, to ‘protest in the strongest possible terms at the disgraceful overcrowding that was allowed to occur in the Leppings Lane terrace area … The whole area was packed solid to the point where it was impossible to move and where I, and others around me, felt considerable concern for my personal safety.’*

In 1987, Leeds Utd’s FA Cup semi-final with Coventry City was delayed by 15 minutes on the advice of the police match commander, after late-arriving Leeds fans, held up at police checkpoints, found themselves in a bottleneck at the Leppings Lane turnstiles. And in 1981, 38 Spurs fans were injured on the Leppings Lane terrace while watching their FA Cup semi-final against Wolves. This was no minor incident: the injuries included broken arms, a broken leg and crushed ribs, after the Leppings Lane’s capacity was exceeded by over 400. The South Yorkshire Police averted disaster by shutting off the tunnel and allowing 150 fans to climb over the fence and sit beside the pitch. Following the match, Assistant Chief Constable Goslin told the Sheffield Wednesday chairman, Bert McGee, that there had been ‘a real chance of fatalities’. McGee replied: ‘Bollocks! No one would have been killed.’

Shortly afterwards, the South Yorkshire Police notified Sheffield Wednesday that they believed the 10,100 capacity of the Leppings Lane was set too high. But the club dismissed their concerns: Sheffield Wednesday blamed the near-disaster on poor policing.

Thus began a decade of piecemeal renovation of the stadium and fitful liaison between the organisations charged with ensuring it met safety regulations. The 1975 Safety of Sports Grounds Act stipulated that any stadium with a capacity of more than 10,000 spectators for football should have a safety certificate, and that it was the responsibility of a local authority to issue this certificate. Hillsborough, with a capacity of 54,000, sat squarely within this category. Between 1978 and October 1988, the ground saw a series of structural modifications, but the stadium’s safety certificate, issued in December 1979, was not updated in line with these alterations.

That Spurs fans avoided fatalities in 1981 was due in no small part to the fact that the Leppings Lane was still one open terrace – it had not been divided into pens. This allowed Spurs supporters to move sideways and escape the crush.

However, in late 1981 the West terrace (which combined with the adjoining, raised Northwest terrace to form the Leppings Lane) was carved into three pens. The fitting of radial fences should have seen the total capacity of the Leppings Lane reduced by 100, but the original figure of 10,100 was retained. Sheffield Wednesday and the club’s structural engineers, Eastwoods, also considered introducing turnstiles to count the number of spectators entering both the West terrace (capacity: 7,200) and the Northwest terrace (2,900). The proposal was shelved. Now, with no means of monitoring the number of spectators in each section, and with an out-of-date calculation of safe capacity, the club was operating with an invalid safety certificate.

In July 1985, the central pen of the Leppings Lane was further divided by a new radial fence into two pens – numbered 3 and 4. But a proposal for monitoring the number of fans on each terrace was declined a second time, on the grounds of anticipated cost. While Sheffield Wednesday spent £340,000 on safety measures that summer, in response to the fire at Valley Parade, this oversight would prove...