For Tottenham, finally the home stage is reached. After seemingly endless delays, after embarrassing hold-ups, after an ever-lengthening stay at a temporary home that grew less appealing by the day, on Wednesday April 3, more than seven months after it was first scheduled to happen, the new Tottenham Stadium will open for business.

In order to reach this stage, Christopher Lee, of the architecture consultancy Populous, has done something not many in football would envy: he has spent much of the past six years in the company of the Spurs chairman Daniel Levy. Together with the man he calls “the most demanding client I have ever worked with (and I mean that in a positive way)” Lee has travelled the world, visiting dozens of buildings, seeking out ideas and features that might be incorporated, magpie-like, into the new stadium he was designing.

“Everywhere we went – arenas, airports, concert halls – he’d see something that he liked,” he says of Levy. “Maybe the bar there, the cladding there, the line of the roof there. He never stopped. He sends out dozens of emails at ungodly times, I don’t think he ever sleeps. From the moment we started the process six years ago, he has been hell bent on one thing: delivering the perfect stadium.”