In the same year that they completed the work at Fulham, 1896, the Mears boys spotted a great location in west London that could be developed into a football venue. There was a major omnibus terminus at Farm Lane, a couple of streets away from the prospective ground, a growing local population and a tube station called Walham Green, which we now know as Fulham Broadway, a short walk away. They were convinced,
Field of Dreams
style, that if they built a football stadium, the spectators would come - and come in numbers - although there was the small matter of not actually having a football team.
The spot they had in mind was Stamford Bridge Athletic Ground, but they could not get hold of it until eight years later. By the time they got the land in 1904, they had various options. One was to make a quick turnaround on the purchase and sell the land to Great Western Railway as a fuel depot; the second option was to develop it a bit and get Fulham Football Club to move in as tenants. The third and least attractive option was to build a football stadium and start their own team.
The Mears brothers approached Fulham to try to entice them up the road to a lovely, spacious new ground. Fulham faced a bit of a dilemma. If you know this part of London, Fulham’s ground is an absolute gem to behold and something of an oddity because of its location. It is right bang on the banks of the Thames and known widely to the non-footballing public as one of the markers for the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.
So, picture this: on the south side the ground is bordered by the River Thames, and on all the other sides it’s surrounded by rather nice Victorian houses, and at the Putney end the leafy green of Bishop’s Park. The site is worth a packet nowadays. Expansion of the ground and facilities was always going to be a problem for the club, but the Fulham directors of 1904 baulked at the offer from the Mears brothers for a move to Stamford Bridge Athletic Ground. Instead, Fulham decided to improve their own site a bit more.
This time, and perhaps not surprisingly, the Mears’ firm did not get the contract. The Fulham board did not mess about, and they called in an engineer who had a growing reputation for his work on football stadiums. His name was Archibald Leitch, a Scotsman who during this period effectively invented how football grounds should look and whose simple formula was implemented by clubs up and down the country for the next 70 years. His trademark ground was a covered grandstand along one length of the pitch distinguished by a gable in the middle, often adorned with a clock or club symbol, with open terraces on the other three sides. A design he perfected with one of his first commissions south of the border at Craven Cottage.
Now, I have a particular interest in Craven Cottage and Fulham for three reasons. The first is the decision by Fulham in 1904 to stay put rather than move to the Bridge. It was momentous, and if they had their time again I wonder if the directors would have made the same choice. The impact of their snub to the Mears boys had a dramatic impact on football in the capital. If Fulham had moved to Stamford Bridge there would have been no Chelsea, because there would have been no need to create a new team to play at Stamford Bridge. So I guess I’d have been a Stamford Bridge regular supporting Fulham as my team. Perish the thought. The new Stamford Bridge-based Fulham would have had room to develop and expand, and with bigger crowds and income . . . who knows?
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.