BY NIALL McCRAE
The more people, the fewer amenities. This phenomenon may seem counter-intuitive: surely a booming population in our cities would generate a greater market for goods and services? But that depends on the commodity. Yes, there will be more consumption, but local community life is not necessarily improved by ever-expanding housing development, particularly if the influx is mostly from foreign countries and cultures.
Churches, pubs, amateur dramatic societies, neighbourhood watch – all are disappearing fastest where white Britons are demographically replaced.
Demonstrating the decline of suburban life in London is the loss of local football clubs. I have in my hand a programme from 1979 for Wembley FC (that’s Wembley the district, not the famous stadium). This club is still playing at Vale Farm on Watford Road, but at a lower level. The ground was shared with Hendon for several seasons, after the latter club lost its home.
The cover of the programme has a quaint scene from a match with a backdrop of trees. But the area of Wembley has changed beyond recognition in the fifty-odd years since. Carefully clipped box hedges have been concreted over. Apartment blocks rise around the Tube stations. Pubs have become Indian restaurants. Churches have given way to masjeeds. Shops repairing mobile phones and selling fruit and vegetables in plastic bowls for a pound stay open late at night. As I know from visiting the nearby Alperton recently, hardly anyone speaks English as you pass them.
White Londoners have upped sticks, leaving their part of the metropolitan sprawl to Asians and other incomers.
The Isthmian League, comprising clubs from the London area, is on a high level of the football pyramid, below the national leagues. Its premier division is equal to that of the Southern and Northern Leagues. I know it well, having supported Carshalton Athletic when I lived on the suburban fringe. Today, many of the competing clubs are from further out in the Home Counties, as far as the Sussex and Kent coast.
Many of the suburban London teams have gone forever. An obvious factor is the property value, grounds of struggling clubs being sold for housing. Tooting & Mitcham had a fine ground, the only remnant a floodlight pylon retained as a telecommunication mast.
The fall has been steepest in the east of London. One of the names in the Isthmian League table in the Wembley FC programme was new, Leytonstone having merged with Ilford before the 1979-1980 season. In 1989 this pairing absorbed Walthamstow Avenue, a team renowned for FA Cup exploits including holding Manchester United to a draw at Old Trafford in 1953, to become Redbridge Forest. In 1992 the complex of former clubs moved out to Dagenham, still playing today as Dagenham & Redbridge.
Romford, a club that aimed for Football League entry, was forced to leave its commodious Brooklands ground in 1977. The refounded Romford shares a ground with Barking, another club that folded before being revived. The East End, previously a nest of footballing talent that produced the likes of Bobby Moore, David Beckham and Frank Lampard (senior and junior), has become a desert of local football clubs.
Amateur teams still play on Sunday mornings at Hackney Marshes. The Bengali community in Tower Hamlets has its own keenly contested league. But there is limited space for kicking a ball about, and youngsters of all ethnicity are more interested in their mobile phones than playing or watching football in their area.
Only the big clubs prosper, and few of their players are from London boroughs. More than half of major London clubs’ players may be black, but increasingly they are brought from abroad, rather than kids from Grange Hill.
West Ham United plays to huge crowds in the former Olympic stadium in Stratford, and Orient has its loyal support, but there is little local identity in the districts of east London. Few residents have been there for more than one or two generations. It’s rootless and atomised. The BBC series Eastenders is now a figment of imagination, unless the fictitious Walford were transported ten miles out, into Essex.
A fitting advertisement in the Wembley programme from 1979 is by a company providing an air cargo service. The bold message is…. ‘Emigrating?’
Niall McCrae is the author of ‘Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm’ (2024).