The Club recently published a new book, 'A Decade of Dreams', to celebrate our first ten years at Madejski Stadium - and starting today, over the next two months we'll be serialising extracts from the book exclusively here on readingfc.co.uk

Today's first excerpt is taken from Chapter One, examining the initial motivation behind John Madejski's decision to build a new stadium and move away from Elm Park.

An extract from Chapter Two - the opening day fixture against Luton Town in August 1998 - will be featured here next week.

The 256-page fully illustrated hardback book is priced £16.99 and available now in the Madejski Stadium Megastore, by mail order on 0118 907 0372 and in our online shop here.

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Chapter One - In The Beginning...

The early nineties was a period of revolution in terms of football stadia. Hastened by the horrors of the Hillsborough disaster in April 1989, when 96 Liverpool supporters died in a crush on the Leppings Lane terrace, facilities were being renewed, refreshed, redeveloped and rebuilt at a rapid rate.

The subsequent Taylor Report into the causes of the disaster decreed that standing terraces should become a thing of the past, and clubs including Huddersfield, Bolton, Derby, Millwall, Sunderland and Middlesbrough pressed forward with plans to build entirely new grounds, while huge amounts of new-found TV revenue (following the Sky-led launch of the Premier League in 1992) were ploughed into improving existing facilities at famous arenas such as Old Trafford, Highbury, White Hart Lane and, most poignantly, Anfield, where the Kop was converted into seating in 1994.

Reading were in a difficult position. The urban location of Elm Park meant that significant redevelopment of the ground was impossible - there simply wasn't the land to build on. And converting the three existing terraced stands into seating would have reduced the overall capacity to less than 10,000 - clearly insufficient to sustain Premier League, or even Division One, football.

So it didn't take John Madejski long to come to a stark conclusion - to take Reading into the Premiership, he needed to build a new ground.

Speaking in an exclusive new interview, he reflects, "Fundamentally we knew that, due to the Taylor Report, trying to revamp Elm Park was a complete waste of time and effort, because it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was landlocked. It was perfectly good when it was built 100 years ago because people used to walk everywhere and it was easy to get to. But people don't walk anywhere these days. Elm Park was past its sell-by date and we desperately needed to switch to a new environment. We definitely had to move, everyone realised it."

Deciding to move was the easy part - finding a suitable site proved to be more challenging. Although he did widen the search to the outer reaches of Berkshire, Madejski was always keen to build the new ground within the borough of Reading if at all possible, but identifying the required amount of space within the confines of the River Thames and the M4 was not an easy task. "The final site wasn't the first place that came along," says Madejski.

"We looked extensively, all around the County of Berkshire quite frankly. Inside and outside of Reading, there were lots of places we looked at. We needed a big site because I didn't want to go for bog standard. I wanted to produce a stadium we could all be proud of."

To assist with the process, in 1995 Madejski appointed Nigel Howe to oversee the identification of a suitable site and the eventual construction of the new stadium.

The nephew of former Arsenal and England coach Don Howe, Nigel's area of professional expertise lay in property development and he relished the opportunity of fulfilling Madejski's dream. Interviewed for this book, Howe recalls, "When I came to Reading after being introduced to John Madejski by one of the Club's directors, Graham Denton, who I had worked with in the past, I knew very little about what was going to happen.

"Madejski said that the Council had come up with two potential sites some months before - one is the site which we're now on, and the other was where the existing greyhound stadium is and the land around there.

"At the time I think he felt this was the better site in location terms and when I came along to my first meeting with the Council I quickly agreed with that. I felt it had the best potential access routes. We immediately went into discussions about how we could get into negotiations about acquiring the land from the Council and relocating from Elm Park."

Read the full story in 'A Decade of Dreams', available now in the Madejski Stadium Megastore, by mail order on 0118 907 0372 and in our online shop here.