Highbury has been the Gunners’ home throughout a significant chapter of English football history, including 13 League Champion titles and 10 FA Cup wins. So when the club’s management decided to move to a glamorous new home – the £390 million, 60,000-seat Emirates Stadium in Islington – it was important to bring a sense of the club’s history.

Specialist sports museum designer Mather & Company came up with the idea for an Arsenal museum in the stadium’s Northern Triangle building. Called ‘The Arsenal Story’, the museum provides a history of the club and illustrates it with artefacts and exhibits donated by former players and managers.

“The idea was to encourage activity in the stadium on non-match days, and to add to the visitor experience when visiting the stadium,” says Chris Mather, Mather & Company’s principal.

Signage and display work for the museum was carried out by Huddersfield-based large-format printer Leach Colour – which recently scooped a Platinum at the Fespa Awards 2007 for its work on the project. Leach had never worked with Mather before, although the company’s reputation was well known to Chris Mather. “I decided to use Leach partly because the firm is well-known in the museums world, and partly because it had just invested a lot of money in new kit and it was all very impressive,” Mather says.

The project was a complex one, involving a total of 120 items ranging from display panels through backlit displays to printing onto glass. Leach Colour’s sales and marketing director Graham Evans was delighted to learn that the spec for the job included aspects of all Leach’s primary specialisations in digital print, screen print and installation. From initial discussion to final installation, the project took two months.

Leach worked with Mather to suggest and extend the brief, offering up some of its more unusual specialist services, such as in-situ screen printing. The service is known in Leach’s portfolio as Screen Direct, and is carried out by skilled staff who take to the site a specially-adapted bracket that clips the screen onto the surface to be printed. Ink is squeegeed onto the screen, the wipe is done by hand, and the screen lifted off, leaving the single-colour print behind. In the Arsenal Emirates museum, Screen Direct was used to print the museum’s concrete pillars in white ink with sections of narrative from the Arsenal history.

Security of the panels and artefacts was a primary consideration. “There’s a possibility of enthusiastic fans coming along with screwdrivers to take home souvenirs of their favourite players,” says Evans. “So we made everything as secure and unliftable as possible.” Printing was, wherever possible, done direct to the substrate which was installed in situ, and where this wasn’t possible, panels were strongly laminated to structural elements of the museum.

Another consideration was how to keep the interchangeability of display items while maintaining the high level of security: “Players come and go, and the story changes, so there’s a need to keep up to date and change the museum exhibits,” points out Evans. Leach achieved this by using proprietary techniques and a range of secure, flush fixings.

Some museum exhibits required extremely high print resolution, such as the glass panel that commemorates Arsenal’s 2004 longest-ever unbeaten run in English league football: the design of the panel incorporates the names of the players printed in such a way that a viewer standing back would see the names merge to form the face of current manager Arsène Wenger. “We screen-printed that direct onto glass with a highly scratch-resistant white ink,” says Evans.

There was an issue of colour consistency for Leach. Because almost all of the total 120 elements incorporated some proportion of process colour, it was a challenge to make this consistent across the different technologies of digital inkjet and screen process. Evans won’t reveal how it was done, referring only to Leach’s origins as a photographer’s studio and then lab: “Our staff have more than 800 years of colour expertise between them, and we used that to make sure we were consistent,” he says.

The museum’s success, says Chris Mather, has taken many of Arsenal’s senior management by surprise: “I think a lot of them thought sports museums were boring places. But this is a top-notch venue. It really promotes the Arsenal brand and adds value for fans.”

The museum is expected to pull in 140,000 visitors this year, all of whom will also get a stadium tour, increasing the club’s ancillary revenue.