George Devo’s weekly column on life in the capital, published every Monday morning…
I’m writing this with the steadily undulating hills of the east-Midlands flashing past me, soon to give way to the ironed-flat fenland of Lincolnshire, Hertfordshire’s suburban sprawl and, finally, to the high-rise bustle of London.
I’ve spent the weekend in Hull, in East Yorkshire, and am now halfway into my three-hour train journey back.
I’ve been to the city before, on a trip organised by my dad to show our family where he’d attended university. This time I’d again go with my dad, but for a different reason — a football match.
I’m a long-suffering supporter of Norwich City football club and have spent many Saturday afternoons in random corners of post-industrial England watching ‘The Canaries’ struggle to take flight. Yesterday’s 1-1 draw in a 2° Humberside chill was no different.
However, despite the mediocre football and brutal coastal weather, I can’t think of a better way to spend a weekend.
Now picture a different scene, a few weeks ago: three hundred people gathered around a grass rectangle in South-London’s Bermondsey.
A long queue stretches from the car park’s burger van to the door of the club bar, where an equal number wait for a cheap can of locally brewed lager.
Behind the pitch towers the Canary Wharf skyline. The fact the full breadth of the Thames is separating us from that is a useful visual analogy for the difference between this 116 year old sporting institution, founded to keep restless and underprivileged Edwardian youth busy, and London’s thirty-year-old ode to the free market.
The 11 men of Fisher FC kick off.
“Fish, fish, fish” roars the crowd. As is the way of tier 9 football their squad is constantly in flux, meaning many supporters don’t know any of their player’s names, choosing instead to chant the club’s nickname and the animal on its badge. The smirks on fans’ faces, and intermittent giggling, hinting that their singing might be, just a little, tongue-in-cheek.
The Fish sit eight divisions below the bright lights of the Premier League and seven beneath Norwich City’s Championship. 426 football clubs lie between this South London minnow and nationally-dominant Liverpool.
I didn’t even care if Fisher lost this match. Amusingly, I’m reliably informed that the club’s board didn’t either; the team are having a pretty successful season but promotion would mean the footballing authorities demanding costly stadium improvements to match their new step-8 status, a bill they might be unable to match.
It was a sporting event totally without jeopardy, no stakes whatsoever. Logically pointless.
Yet it was the perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
Now, reader, I understand that you may have no interest in football. You may have reached this stage of the column feeling a mixture of confusion, boredom and pity.
However, I think there’s purpose in how I’ve spent my weekend and that Saturday afternoon. Let me try and explain.
In part, it’s the habit of it. I’m a Norwich fan because my dad’s a Norwich fan, and he’s one because he was raised in the city where thousands had made supporting the club their weekly routine since its founding in 1902. Similarly, local dockers throughout the early 1900s would’ve lined Fisher’s pitch just as we did.
This pattern provides a structure for local communities across the country. Their stadium acts as a stable centre for their lives to orbit.
Surely there’s a point in that?
London’s endlessly changing. Its population has grown by 32% since 1990 – compared to the national average of 19% – with gentrification and new investment leaving much of the city’s character and image unrecognisable from thirty, twenty or even ten years ago.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe there’s still a distinctive soul left in our capital. It can feel like an enormous train station, everyone’s just passing through.
However, in a patch of South London you can pay £5 every week, wrap a black and white scarf around your neck and find some authentic, organic history and community in the area you’re standing in.
Some compare football to religion, the stadiums essentially places of worship. However, for me, this misses the point.
At Fisher FC there’s no priest asking for donations – the players aren’t even paid – nor a sermon dictating how we should live.
Nobody asks anything from you on a Saturday afternoon watching Bermondsey’s second biggest football club, your presence is enough.
Because, whilst the dockers might’ve gone, their narrow docks made redundant by the width of modern cargo ships, as long as The Fish are still kicking some of their traditions are kept alive.
A bit of soul under the shadow of Canary Wharf.
