by Suggs
My fondness for Craven Cottage is also rooted in the fact that it’s the first ground I ever went to, at the tender age of five. The magic of that introduction to the game, on the banks of the Thames, has stayed with me ever since. And the final reason for my interest in Fulham is the stadium itself. While Stamford Bridge has been through some horrendous periods of demolition and rebuilding over the years, Fulham has survived bloody but unbowed and retains the only stand from the Edwardian era in London pretty much as it was originally constructed. It’s even retained its wooden seats, which contrary to expectations are actually very comfy and warm to the bum.
Craven Cottage is place of real footballing nostalgia and even a hard-hearted old Chelsea supporter like myself couldn’t fail to have a soft spot for it, particularly as Leitch, its original designer, also designed the first stand at Chelsea, which is pretty much identical to the stand at Fulham.
One of the pleasures of Fulham’s ground is the very fact that it is constructed by Leitch to fit so unobtrusively into its neighbourhood. Walking down Stevenage Road, you’d never know you were patrolling the back of a football stand unless you cross over and look up and see the floodlights. The man who was keen on this sympathetic design was Henry Norris, Mayor of Fulham, a property developer and house builder who also just happened to be on the board at Fulham. At the time of this construction project, Norris was the man at Fulham’s helm. He wanted the exterior of the main stand to blend in with the masonry and brick-work of the surrounding streets, which were full of rather splendid family houses, many of which were built by Norris’s own firm.
The facade of the stand is all a bit of a con really because standing on Stevenage Road from the outside of the ground, what you see is regular red brick and what look like stable doorways with half-moon windows above. Look above ground level and there is a fake first-storey row of grander windows with carved masonry, followed by another layer of subterfuge and more windows. An innocent to the area might be wondering just what that building is. Could it be a warehouse, perhaps, with floors of offices above?
But the glory is on the inside. If you get a chance to go behind the brick facade, do it on a day when you aren’t going to be distracted by the trifling matter of a game. (I went with the world authority on the football grounds of Great Britain, Simon Inglis.) Behind the fake stable doors, you’ll find yourself standing on the concrete concourse and above your head are great iron girders, joists and bolts, all made on the banks of the Clyde and shipped down to London ready to be assembled, like a huge Meccano set, in the closed season. A triumph of functional design.
Once you are out from underneath all that iron and sitting in the stand, you can glance across to Leitch’s version of the Baron’s cottage. It looks like a poor man’s version of the pavilion at Lord’s Cricket Ground, with wrought-iron pillars and balcony. But it also has that cottagey touch, with the two chimney pots front and back. You could imagine the players coming in at half time on a cold February afternoon and warming their socks on the stovepipe while toasting their crumpets on the hot coals.
So what about those entrepreneurial builders Gus and Joe Mears? When Fulham spurned their offer to move to Stamford Bridge Athletic Stadium, the Mearses had a ground with no team. Legend has it that they were wondering what to do when their mate Fred Parker set out a plan of how they could make money from football. Parker was so determined to win them over that he continued his argument despite being bitten on the leg by Gus Mears’ terrier. Convinced by Parker’s persistence, the small matter of having no team did not seem to worry anyone too much. First things first, what on earth were they going to call this new team they had just created out of thin air? The three of them bandied some names about over a few drinks in the Rising Sun, just over the road from the main entrance to the ground.
Abramovich’s predecessors rejected the names London FC and Kensington FC, and settled on Chelsea FC. They got Leitch - who else? - in to sort out the stadium, and Chelsea FC were off and running. It was 1905. A brand-new team with no players had been born, the marvellous brainchild of a group of west London property speculators.
If you care to venture into the same pub for a drink now, it’s been renamed and is now the Butcher’s Hook. On the occasion of the club’s centenary, I was there for an event, the first time I’d been in for a while. The club dedicated every year of its 100-year history to someone who they felt had made a contribution to Chelsea’s illustrious heritage, and they very kindly gifted me the year 1997, for my cup-winning song ‘Blue Day’. (Not that I felt I’d won it single-handedly of course.) I was thrilled with the honour, which was not a state of mind shared by the clientele of a certain QPR-leaning pub on Portobello Road after my mate Alf slipped that particular song into their jukebox one match day and selected it 14 times in a row. Now I come to think of it, perhaps I should have had a few other years too. Perhaps, for example, the year I stood with a measly crowd to watch the mighty Blues struggling to a titanic 0-0 with Coventry. Actually, the whole lot of us should have got some reward and commendation just for being there.
I’m proud to have my name put to 1997, and am almost as proud that the good people at the marvellous Chelsea independent magazine CFCUK started a campaign to get a small flight of steps leading out of an alley from the ground, that I have taken an occasional stumble up, named the Suggs Steps. My life is almost complete!
Let’s roll back to the arrival of Chelsea on the scene in 1905. It affected Fulham big time. The two teams were now competing for spectators, but Chelsea had a bigger ground and, like Arsenal, had enrolled in the football league. Only six years after the redevelopment of Fulham’s ground by Leitch, Henry Norris, their chairman and the local property magnate, seemed to think that Fulham needed to ‘push on to the next level’, which meant more space and more spectators. Perhaps his thoughts were prompted by the successes of Chelsea, the new kids on the block. Chelsea, with their massive goalie captain, 6 foot 3 inch and 20-stone Willie Foulke, who probably intimidated all onrushing strikers with his sheer bulk, won promotion from the football league’s second division in only their second year. It looked like Norris thought Fulham’s ambitions were too limited. Perhaps they had missed a trick by not moving to Stamford Bridge?
Norris scouted around for better options for his ambition and money. He saw that Woolwich Arsenal, a steady enough outfit out in the sticks in south-east London, were now in debt, having taken on the burden of borrowing money to buy their own ground, thus becoming one of the first clubs to learn that getting into debt and embarking on expensive building projects can be a recipe for disaster. Somewhat controversially, Henry Norris defected to Arsenal, perhaps seeing an opportunity to develop a team in his own image, like the Mears brothers’ creation of Chelsea. And they say there’s no loyalty in football now! Norris took Arsenal to a new ground to make a new start, and so begins the story of Arsenal at Highbury.
If you were going to make money from football in London, you needed to be able to get bums on seats or feet on stands. That meant two things: you needed to be based somewhere that was easy for potential supporters to get to, and you needed a site that could be developed to accommodate them. Norris secured a lease on playing fields in Highbury in north London which belonged to St John’s College of Divinity. The lease was countersigned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less. Though a blessing from on high was probably welcome, what was crucial for Norris was that the land he had secured was bang next to a newly opened tube station called Gillespie Road.
Again, Leitch was called in to design the first stadium, which opened for business in 1913, but the iconic ground associated with the club took shape in 1931, when Highbury was completely redeveloped and local residents were invited to come and empty their rubbish at the north and south ends of the ground to build up the banking for the terraces. Apparently, a helpful coal merchant reversed his horse and cart too near to the footings for the north bank stand, and in he went with the whole shebang. The poor nag could not be rescued from
the hole and was buried where she fell.
While this escapade shows that even during the 1930s the horse was a familiar sight on the local streets of London, the new Highbury Stadium was meant to be all about modernity and looking to the future, and was beautifully designed in the style of the moment, art deco.
If you should chance to travel up on the Piccadilly line, it is still worth stopping off at Arsenal tube station - the cheeky fellows even got London Transport to rename Gillespie Road after them, the only club in London with their own tube station. Even though Arsenal have moved around the corner to their new stadium - the Emirates, at Drayton Park - remnants of their old stadium at Highbury survive. Like Fulham’s Leitch stand and cottage, the art deco facade of the east stand on Avenell Road is considered a unique relic of football in London, and it has been listed. It is a thing of beauty, with its stylish mouldings and sweeping windows. A touch of the magic of the place has gone though because behind the marble and the glass aren’t club officials complaining to the FA about a disputed incident that they didn’t see or the reek of liniment, just floor upon floor of luxurious flats.
Arsenal and Chelsea supporters seem to have a lot to thank Fulham for, one way or another. Chelsea’s very existence and Arsenal’s success seem to be strangely entwined with Fulham, and the history of both teams seems largely based on the ambitions of builders to make a bit of cash.
I have heaped praise on Fulham’s ground and traced the early fortunes of Arsenal to their arrival at Highbury, but what of good old Stamford Bridge? ‘The only place to be/ Every other Saturday/Is strolling down the Fulham Road.’ Now that sounds like a good song. I don’t go to every match, but every time I do go, I get the same feeling of anticipation, and regardless of what has happened to the game - or the product or brand or whatever it is now called - it will always be my first love. ‘Meet your mates, have a drink, have a moan and start to think, will there ever be a blue tomorrow?’ Faces you haven’t seen for ages having heated discussion in the pubs, kids skipping down the road with brand new scarves, happy as I was the first time I went.
I’ve got my memories. In particular those days in the Shed, a kind of oversized car port with a corrugated roof at the south end of the stadium. It barely covered a third of the crowd on the south terracing. Then there was the occasional river of piddle coming down the terracing from the lavs at the back. There you were, squashed in the crowd, literally feeling the noise, in the words of that great philosopher Noddy Holder. The place was becoming a bit of a footballing shanty town: different-shaped stands higgledy-piggledy around the ground, and facilities that were next to nought. Much as I loved it, it was falling apart as I stood there.
For each new generation, the memories will be different. The stadium that drew me in like a magnet and then enfolded me in her loving embrace has gone. Now all that remains of the stadium I first visited as a child is a bit of the old Shed end wall that has a little blue plaque on it to mark its survival through years of turmoil and bankruptcy.
That old ground did have to go, but building new stands for largely absent spectators nearly brought about the club’s demise. Having won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1971 against the might of Real Madrid, I guess we thought glory would always be ours. We pulled down the old Leitch stand and commissioned some fabulous architects, Darbourne & Darke, to redesign Stamford Bridge at a cost of £6 million - a mere bagatelle to us kings of the King’s Road. We were going to start with a ‘stand of the future’ with a built-in heating system wafting warm air, presumably perfumed with rose petals picked at dawn, around the posteriors of the spectators. Just this one stand was going to cost £1.6 million and, remember, these are 1972 prices - a loaf of bread cost about 8 new pence, we had just gone decimal, and a pint of beer was about 13 new pence. We were committing ourselves to selling a lot of burger buns and pints of lager for years to come.
One side of the ground was laid to waste while we waited and waited for two seasons for the new East Stand to emerge from the rubble, ‘massive imposing, ruinous’ as Simon Inglis notes in his book Football Grounds of Britain. The monster stand that was created still looks modern 30 or so years after it was completed. It’s on three levels, with a steeply raking upper tier which seems to defy gravity and a roof that hangs like a claw over the blue seats below. Again, I can’t do better than Simon’s observation that when it was first unveiled it made the rest of the ground look like ‘Neolithic ruins’. This was going to be the beginning of the new grand plan - the whole ground was to be redeveloped in this style.
The problem was that it was built just as the world was going into recession in the early 1970s. The stand was built for the boom times, not an economic slump and, what was worse, it was matched by a slump in our performance on the grass. Soon after our lovely new stand was ready for the bottoms of Chelsea fans, Chelsea were sitting at the bottom of the league. Then we were relegated, and if you were old enough, you wept into your 13p pint.
Spectators weren’t exactly clamouring to come to Stamford Bridge anyway. Football was not in the least bit fashionable, not completely unjustifiably, and the papers were full of stories about hooliganism. I remember clearly there was genuine embarrassment in certain circles to have a football supporter in their midst.
Being a Chelsea supporter, it helped that I developed the emotional range to deal with Kipling’s ‘triumph and disaster’ over the course of an afternoon without feeling the need to call a football phone-in show for support or counselling. Not that there were any. And while I have not missed a wedding or a funeral in favour of football, I admit that I have been sacked. In fact, I was sacked from Madness because I went to a game rather than to work. I’d been struggling to cover my tracks when missing our regular Saturday afternoon rehearsals, only to discover, when flicking through the now-defunct Melody Maker, an advert for ‘a semi professional singer’ along with our keyboard player’s phone number. Fortunately, the replacement only lasted a few weeks, and I was back. I’ve managed to have a relatively successful career with the band ever since and still follow my beloved Blues, with no sign of another replacement being sought in the small ads. Although I’m sure there have been one or two moments when they wish they could!
I went on to have two lovely girls who’ve been coming to the Bridge since they were six, and still do on occasion, even though they’re now both in their 20s. As for me, I still go as often as I can, although Madness duties do mean that I’m not always around. And despite the over-commercialisation that tests my love on an almost weekly basis, the thrill of the live spectacle excites me as much as it ever did. But it’s a real shame that standing terracing has gone. I would have loved to see a new Shed. It would be cheaper for the fans and more cost effective for the clubs because you can get more than twice the number of people standing as seated, and the atmosphere created is far more vibrant. Some German clubs have managed to overcome the health and safety concerns and have adapted stands very successfully to allow for safe standing, so where there is a will, there is a way.
I know the clubs care about the fans and the standard of facilities nowadays is wonderful, but I can’t help but feel that if football was more affordable then more families would go to the games. And that should be seen as being important. Multiple generations attending together and sharing the experience - as happened to me and as I’ve done with my children in turn - is surely essential to protect the long-term health of the game. It is the supporters who keep the whole thing alive. We are the people who care about the result, the race or the raindrop, if only for the duration of the event until normality resumes and we remember we still have to do the washing-up or walk the dog. Without spectators, greyhound racing will wither and die; and without fans and atmosphere, what is a football ground?
CHAPTER NINE
Cinema City
I’m not proud to admit it, but as a young kid I was in a gang whose membership spread right across the country. Each Saturday morning I’d meet up with fellow members of my local br
anch in a dark, cavernous building on the Fulham Road. All of us wore luminous badges emblazoned with our gang’s logo, but none of us stood up for the National Anthem when ordered to do so by a rival gang known as the Management. Yes, this band of brothers (and sisters) was mad, bad and dangerous to know. We went by the name of the ABC Minors.
For me, and countless others of a certain age, the Saturday morning pictures were a ritual and a riot. Parents would happily wave their kids off to the local ABC cinema, under the impression that they’d spend three trouble-free hours watching a selection of Children’s Film Foundation movies, cartoons, westerns, The Three Stooges, Zoro and Flash Gordon etc., unaware of the ice cream- and sweet-chucking mayhem that would ensue the second our rallying song was sung and the lights went down. I can still recall ‘The ABC Minors Song’ to this day, which was all about shouting with glee, having a sing-song and being great pals, all jolly and happy and innocent.
It was so twee, it made the Ovaltinies theme tune sound like some of the more ribald choruses I would be singing a few years later in the Shed. However, it used to strike abject terror into the hearts of usherettes, projectionists, cleaners and cinema managers all over the country every Saturday morning, as they sought to contend with the major nuisance wrought by the ABC Minors. Happy days.
As I entered my teens, my local haunts were the Holloway and Camden Odeon cinemas. Both are still standing, but not as the massive one-screen movie houses I remember: they were converted into multiplexes over 30 years ago. And what a shame my daughters’ generation can’t share the extraordinary experience of sitting in the front row of the circle, looking down, through a haze of cigarette smoke, on what looked like a million people, all completely absorbed in the overhead, flickering projection of the film. In those days, of course, smoking was still permitted, but only on the left-hand side of the auditorium. How the smoke was supposed to recognise the boundary, I was never quite sure.
