By Trevor Lambert, OxVox secretary

What makes a house a home? Easy question, perhaps – it’s the place where you belong, with your personal possessions and mementos around you, reflecting you and your life and reminding you of good times, and perhaps less good times too. Your home doesn’t exist in isolation, but as part of a wider community to which you belong.

Carrying these thoughts over to a football ground, and thinking about The Triangle, what can we learn from the Kassam Stadium years, and how can we do better? How can the new ground become truly the home of Oxford United, in ways in which the Kassam has never been?

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Over the years, OxVox has added to the Kassam in an effort to make it feel special and not an ‘off the shelf’ 1990s design with no club identity. Inside the ground, the East Stand mural and South Stand frontage trophy plaques, and famous names on executive boxes, have helped to give some sense of belonging. The club for its part installed the bronze ox and the wall of fan-sponsored names, and worked with OxVox at the time to install the external stand logos.

But these are relatively modest items. Can we do better as we look forward to a new ground?

The club has made a great start in acknowledging our history by designing a new entrance arch in the published plans and pictures. Its significance in echoing the iconic London Road arch at the entrance to the Manor Ground will not be lost on fans who remember the Headington days with affection and pride.

Beyond that, what do fans want to see? We would be fascinated to hear suggestions. Ways of celebrating key figures in the life of the club over its 130 years of existence, certainly. Managers, players, directors, fans. You may want to see a stand named after a particular player, say. Or a statue of a person who made a huge contribution to the club’s success. Maybe a permanent exhibition in the ground recording key stages in the life of the club. That could be the highlight of a stadium tour. And perhaps above all, we are the Yellows, so many may feel that factoring in as much yellow as possible would give the ground a stronger identity than has been the case in Grenoble Road.

Looking forward is important too – over to the artists among us, but an artwork which captures the notion of a bright future for the club would be an idea. Please email suggestions to enquiries@oxvox.org.uk

I started by talking about homes and the notion of home. The Triangle in Kidlington offers a fantastic opportunity to create a new home for our club, and as everyone moving into a new home knows, you want it to reflect your own identity. Let’s think about our ideas.