Words & Pictures to Follow: Redbridge vs Heybridge Swifts - On The Edge of The Green Buckle

No, not that Redbridge, *that* Redbridge. The one that used to be... look, I told you this was complicated.

Barkingside underground station—which, like most of the outer circle of the London Underground and 55% of it in total, is pronouncedly overground—pushes hard against the Green Belt. If anything, it’s not so much the Green Belt as the Green Buckle, an obstinate sliver of greenery that marks what is effectively the only gap between London and South & East Essex, squeezing between Hainault and Collier Row before flowering out into villages with names like Fox Hatch, Stapleford Abbotts and Doddinghurst.

It is also right next door to Oakside, the home of Redbridge Football Club. And yes, I know what you’re thinking, but on the off-chance that you’re not, no, they are nothing to do with Dagenham & Redbridge FC, though they do have one thing in common. Twenty years ago this year, Ford United became Redbridge FC. They had been formed as a works team in 1959, but the Ford Motor Company from whom they took their name was starting to leave the local area. Ford Dagenham reduced in size from employing 40,000 people in 1953 to around 2,000 today. It was time to spread their wings and connect a little more with their local community.

It speaks volumes for the upbringing of those who ran football in London and the south-east of England that classical references spring up so commonly. Everybody knows the Isthmian League, of course, but there remain a pile of others too, including the Spartan South Midlands League, the Hellenic League, and the Essex Olympian League.

There are also many that ceased to exist, and which are now rapidly fading memories. The Athenian League, for example, folded in 1984, meaning that it won’t be too long before you have to qualify for a bus pass to have to much memory of it. Ford United were formed as a merger of two former works teams, Brigg Sports—who’d been the previous users of Victoria Road, which is now long been the home of Dagenham & Redbridge, so that’s that tenuous connection—and Ford Dagenham. They became founder members of the splendidly-named Aetolian League upon their formation. Clever pun, you see? That’s the benefit of a classical education for you.

This league was merged into a new competition called the Greater London League in 1965, and there Ford United stayed until 1971, when that league merged with another one to form the Metropolitan-London League. In 1974 that league merged with the Spartan League to form the London Spartan League, and was also the point, upon the ending of amateurism, at which Ford United broke free of this nonsense and joined the Essex Senior League instead. Fair enough, really. I mean, it looks exhausting, being in that set-up.

(The completists among you will be pleased to know that I haven’t forgotten that the London Spartan League merged with the South Midlands League in 1997 to form the Spartan South Midlands League, which continues to this day.)

For the next two decades Ford United lived a relatively peaceful county league existence, but in the mid-1990s things started to get spicy. At the start of the 1995/96 season the Ford Motor Company pulled their sponsorship of the club, which called its ongoing existence into question. But when a former vice-chairman stepped in and a lucrative sponsorship deal with Sky Sports was agreed, they started to grow.

In the six seasons between 1996/97 and 2001/02, Ford United raced to four promotions, sweeping their way from the county leagues to the Isthmian League Premier Division, and at a time when this division fed directly into what is now the National League. In the 2004 shake-up that led to the formation of the Conference South, and a chaotic round of end of season matches were required to sort out who ended up where. Ford avoided that and were placed straight into the higher division.

That summer, Ford United changed their name to Redbridge Football Club, and the years that followed were not kind to them. They only lasted one season in the Conference South, finishing bottom of the table. The following season was cataclysicimally bad. They finished bottom of the Isthmian League Premier Division with just 14 points from 42 games, winning three and drawing five, and conceding 97 goals. Things didn’t seem to improve much from there. They had a Cup run in 2011—they were the team that Crawley Town beat in the Second Round on the way to their eventual match at Old Trafford that year—but broadly things didn’t improve that much on the pitch.

Between 2012 and 2016, they finished 20th, 14th, 23rd and 24th in the table, falling back into the Essex Senior League while running up just 28 points from 46 matches and conceding 141 goals. But… something did eventually change. Life back in the Essex Senior League seems to have given the club an opportunity to stabilise, and in 2022 they beat Haywards Heath Town in an inter-league play-off final to seal promotion back into the Isthmian League following an absence of seven years (although only five seasons, of course, due to the pandemic). They finished last season in 13th place out of 19, and they’ll start this weekend's game in 10th place in the table.

As for Heybridge Swifts, well, I have a story about them, so strap yourselves in. In 2004 I had a girlfriend whose parents lived in rural Suffolk, near the Essex border. And in May of that year, while living in Camden in London, we decided to take a few days off and go and see the in-laws, staying a weekend and then on until the following midweek.

It wasn’t uncommon for one or other, or both, of us to stop off on the way back to London, where we lived at the time. On one occasion we stopped off at the Kelvedon Hatch nuclear bunker for a visit and met the (frankly somewhat eccentric) farmer who’d bought it back from the Ministry of Defence when they decommissioned it in the early 1990s. It was cold, dank and creepy, and it smelt of the 1970s.

So there was nothing incredibly odd about me saying that I’d be getting off the train at Hatfield Peverel to go to the football. This non-league reorganisation—as referenced above—had resulted in a set of play-off matches and St Albans City were away to Heybridge Swifts that evening in one of four—don’t ask—semi-finals.

The problem was that this was an era before Google Maps, and Heybridge Swift’s ground was in, well, Heybridge, which is the best part of six miles from Hatfield Fudgin’ Peverel—the second best Hatfield, and that’s not saying much—and is not blessed in any way with a railway station. I had a map, printed off at work the week before, but it was not in the best of conditiona already, so I set off on this long, lonely trudge along a country lane in the middle of the afternoon, eventually arriving at a T-junction and turning left towards something that looked like it may vaguely be a village on the horizon.

I’ve never been so glad to see a pub. Or any form of buildings, as a matter of fact. I got there at about five in the afternoon, having been walking for a good couple of hours. Consequently, by the time I got to the ground itself, I was rather drunk.

But it was totally worth it. City were tied at 1-1 when they had a player sent off, but still went 2-1 up until a late equaliser scrambled the game into extra-time. Heybridge then took the lead before St Albans came back to win it 4-3 in extra-time. A few days later, they won an even more extraordinary final away to Bedford Town, this time 5-4.

(I got a lift back to Hatfield Peverel from Heybridge that night, for those of you who were wondering, though I didn’t get home until hilariously late because the match didn’t finish until getting on for 10.30 at night.)

So Heybridge and I have a bit of history, and Ford and I do as well, since I ended up working for the Ford Motor Company for six years myself when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. I’m also almost certain that I’ll have seen Ford United at some point in the past, but honestly I don’t recall it. I’ve certainly never been to this place next to the Green Buckle before. It’s not the most glamorous of matches in the capital this weekend, but it is a match, and that’s the important thing.

Words and pictures to follow, on Sunday.