The Long Read: Charlton Athletic & The Battle for The Valley
The original plan was to buld the biggest football ground in the world, but in the end Charlton Athletic supporters had to fight to get back to their home.
It seems to have been a common theme amongst professional football clubs based in London that finding an identity was not necessarily straightforward. As the game grew in popularity throughout the second half of the 19th century, the city was expanding at a rapid rate while land was increasing in value and scarcity.
In addition to this, London was slower than the Midlands or the North to fully embrace the professional game, with the London Football Association being one of the last county associations to resist this growth and promote amateurism. Woolwich Arsenal became the first London club to join the Football League in 1893, while several London clubs tried out various names and locations before settling on what we're familiar with today.
So it was for Charlton Athletic. Founded in June 1905, Charlton's first permanent pitch was at Siemens Meadow, a patch of rough ground by the River Thames, near to the present-day site of the Thames Barrier. The club played here for two years before spending a season on Woolwich Common and five years at Pound Park between 1908 and 1913.
The club's early growth had been hampered by the presence of nearby Woolwich Arsenal, but that club's move north of the River Thames in 1913 offered Charlton an opportunity to expand, and that year they joined senior football, moving to the 4,000-capacity Angerstein Athletic Ground as a ground-share with Deptford Invicta FC, which they used until 1915.
After the end of the First World War, Charlton started looking for a home of their own, and the site was located at a chalk quarry known as the Swamps. In the summer of 1919, beginning with a huge bonfire, work began to create the level playing area and remove debris from the site.
In September of that year, Charlton Athletic played their first match at their new home, The Valley. Two years later, the club was elected into the Football League. Still though, the wanderlust remained, and in 1923 the club moved again, this time to share Mount Park with ambitious non-league club Catford Southend, who proposed a merger of the two clubs under their name.
This merger, however, failed to materialise, and delays in getting Mount Park ready for League football meant that Charlton had to stay at The Valley until December 1923. Supporters, however, didn't move en masse with the club, with only 1,000 people attending their last League game of the season, and at the end of 1923-24, Charlton Athletic returned to The Valley.
Directors of the club had hoped for a 200,000 capacity for The Valley, which would have made it the largest football stadium in the world. Election into the Football League in 1921 had encouraged the club to spend a then-astronomical £21,314 - £1.8 million adjusted for inflation to 2025 - on improvements, including a distinctive multi-span roofed grandstand. The final capacity was 75,000 to 80,000, and the results were impressive enough for The Athletic News to describe it as a prospective venue for FA Cup finals, which could make a suitable site for the FA to construct a national stadium.
The Cup finals never came, though. Work on Wembley Stadium started on the other side of London shortly after The Valley opened, and it opened itself in 1923. In addition to this, Charlton had spent in a further £17,330 on the Mount, only to use it for just half a season. Finances were suddenly very tight. Plans had to be scaled down.
The 1930s, however, saw a sudden upturn in the team's fortunes, and in 1935 the club won the first of two successive promotions into the First Division of the Football League under the managership of Jimmy Seed. Charlton Athletic did continue the good work in the First Division, for a while at least. They finished their first season there as runners-up behind Manchester City.
The following season they finished in fourth place, with a crowd of 75,038 people for an FA Cup Fifth Round match against Aston Villa setting a club record and seeming to demonstrate that the potential of Charlton Athletic was finally being tapped. Charlton finished third in the last season before the war, and we can only guess at what might have happened had hostilities not broken out in September 1939.
When the game restarted six years later, the club reached two successive FA Cup finals, losing to Derby County in 1946 and beating Burnley the following year. Charlton's stay in the top flight ended in 1957, by which time the lack of investment in The Valley in previous years was starting to become apparent. Indeed, Charlton didn't even install floodlights there until 1961.
They became a mainstay of the Second Division throughout the 1960s, but the terraces at The Valley were starting to look a little forlorn by the end of the decade, even though the stadium retained a stated capacity of 66,000. The 1970s, however, saw little improvement in the team's fortunes on the pitch, with spells in the Third Division in the middle of the decade and again in 1980.
By the end of the decade, the sense of decline about Charlton Athletic was obvious. The Valley itself became a victim of The Safety of Sports Ground Act, which had been introduced in 1975 as a result of the inquiry into the 1971 Ibrox Stadium disaster. The vast, open East Terrace, which ran along one side of the pitch, was literally cracking under the strain of its age, its weight, and the ground upon which it was built.
The concrete terracing of The Valley was literally rotting away, while there also weren't enough entrances or exits for large crowds. In one fell swoop in 1979, its capacity was cut from 66,000 to 20,000. In January 1981, it was cut again, this time to 13,000. And all of this at a club that had already been in decline for some years, and during a period when football's finances were in a tailspin that wouldn't fully bottom out for several years to come.
The club raised the money to finally renovate some areas of the ground, but in 1982 Charlton Athletic were sold. The club had been owned by the Gliksten family since the 1930s, but now it was owned by a 28-year-old called Mark Hulyer. Hulyer talked a good game, and The Valley was soon buzzing again, no more so than when, in October 1982, they announced the signing of former European Footballer of the Year Allan Simonsen.
When Barcelona signed Diego Maradona in 1982, Spanish league restrictions meant that Simonsen had to compete with Maradona and Bernd Schuster for the two places allowed for foreign players in each starting line-up. Simonsen took this as something of a personal slight and asked Barcelona for his contract to be annulled.
Rejecting offers from Real Madrid and Tottenham Hotspur, he signed for Charlton Athletic for £300,000, and he signed for Charlton in order to play for a club where there would be less stress and attention. It worked for awhile. Simonsen scored nine goals in 16 games, but Charlton simply couldn't afford his wages and he left the following year.
But to say that Charlton couldn't afford Simonsen's wages is really something of an understatement. In 1984, and with an unpaid tax bill for £145,000 already hanging over them, the club collapsed into receivership after a winding-up order brought against them by Leeds United over the non-payment of a transfer fee. Charlton were rescued 25 minutes before the close of a Football League deadline by a company called Sunley Holdings.
As had happened when Mark Hulyer bought the club two years earlier, though, former chairman Michael Gliksten retained ownership of both The Valley and the club's New Eltham training ground. The new owners did attempt to buy the ground from Gliksten, but an offer of £1.25m for the ground, the training ground, and to pay off a loan made to the club by Gliksten several years earlier, was rejected, which left Charlton having to sign a 30-year lease paying £110,000 per season. It was assumed that the Gliksten family's half-century-long association with the club would at least offer it some security. After the insolvency event, the rent was reduced to £70,000 per year for ten years.
Prior events, however, were starting to catch up with Charlton. When The Valley had been designated in 1979, the Greater London Council had wanted to reduce the capacity of the East Terrace to 3,000, but it was eventually agreed that the capacity could stay at 10,000, providing the Glikstens, who then still owned this club, carried out substantial repairs on the terrace. This didn't happen, so the capacity was cut.
And in May 1985, amidst the panic that swept across the country at the realisation that there was a good chance that the majority of Football League grounds were death traps, the GLC closed it altogether. The angle of a sewer under the terrace meant that even the smallest amount of repair work would require an excavation of the entire terrace.
Sunley, who'd already put in substantial money to keep the club afloat a year earlier, baulked at the £2 million cost quoted to carry out the repairs. Crowds were still so low that a reduced capacity of 10,000 likely would have been fine for the club, but having one side of the ground closed altogether would bring with it all sorts of headaches above and beyond mere numbers games.
With dispute already in the air over who would pay for the East Terrace repairs, a second big shock hit the club when Gliksten sealed off two-acre area of land behind the West Stand, which had been used for car parking, toilets and turnstiles. Claim and counterclaim had been made over the years over who was doing what and for what reason. Charlton certainly already knew that Gliksten could do this if he wished. This part of the site had been specifically left out of the lease previously signed, and Gliksten certainly wasn't operating outside of the law.
The effect, however, was the same regardless. Without this piece of land, The Valley wasn't far off unusable, so Charlton needed to find somewhere else to play. It was reported that they'd approached Millwall, four miles away and probably the best option for supporters, but Millwall claimed that no offer was made. West Ham United turned them down.
And then, on Saturday 7th September 1985, the bombshell dropped. From out of nowhere, Charlton Athletic were leaving their home, The Valley, to ground share at Selhurst Park with Crystal Palace. And as though this wasn't bad enough for supporters, the announcement was only made prior to a home league game against Crystal Palace.
As a business decision, there was some degree of sense to it. Selhurst Park was a good facility by the standards of the mid-1980s and such was the nature of South London football during that decade that Ron Noades managed to be the chairman of Wimbledon, Crystal Palace and Brentford within the space of not much over a decade. In Noades, they knew exactly who they were dealing with. Selhurst Park was also, some whispered, considerably closer to the offices of Sunley Holdings.
The supporters' reaction, of course, was apoplectic, and rightly so. It was a terrible deal for supporters. Charlton and Palace were rivals, no matter how much some wished to portray them as friends. The journey across South London might only have been seven miles as the crow flies, but this was at a time when this part of London was something of a public transport black hole. For supporters travelling up from the club's heartlands in South East London and Kent, it was substantially further to travel.
And regardless, this wasn't Charlton Athletic. This was a club raised in the shadow of Woolwich Car Ferry and the Greenwich peninsula. Football clubs have a character, a personality, and part of that is shaped by their surroundings. Uprooting Charlton Athletic and decamping the club to Croydon was about moving considerably further than seven miles, emotionally speaking.
Two weeks later, Charlton played their last match at The Valley amid a fog of protest, a 2-0 win against Stoke City. But in a turn-up for the books, Charlton Athletic were promoted to the First Division at the end of the 1984-85 season, for their first spell in the First Division since 1957. They would last four years in the First Division, struggling for a reasonable amount at the time, and achieving their highest league position of 14th in 1989, before being relegated back to the Second Division in 1990.
By the time that relegation came around, though, the club's world had changed a considerable amount. The move to Selhurst Park had been a disaster, despite winning promotion at the end of their first season there. It was a widely held belief, later confirmed by the wife of one of those who ended up buying the club, that Sunley were deliberately running The Valley into the ground, hoping for leverage in getting permission to sell the land for housing. The football side of things certainly wasn't profitable for them. On meagre crowds and with the feeling growing that the club was running head-first down a cul-de-sac, there was space for somebody who could actually, well, direct the club.
Roger Alwyn made himself wealthy in the City of London and first became involved with Charlton in 1987 as a result of his friendship with another director, former Charlton player Derek Ufton. By 1988, it was clear that Sunley weren't going to get planning permission for the housing on the site of The Valley, while the football club was losing money hand over fist.
Sunley held out for as long as they could, but ultimately it benefited them to sell back to Walwyn and Norris; first the training ground and then the stadium itself. Charlton Athletic and The Valley were reunited, and in 1989 the club formally announced its intention to return to The Valley, holding a bonfire on the pitch, as had happened at the start of the construction of the original stadium exactly 80 years earlier.
The Valley would have to be significantly renovated if it was to be usable again. It had, after all, been left effectively derelict since September 1985 by the previous owners. Yet again, though, Charlton's timing was extremely unfortunate. The Taylor Report, which followed the Hillsborough disaster of April 1989, became the basis for a radical overhaul of football ground safety, and the adoption of the all-seater model meant that the original plans for renovating The Valley needed to be completely redrawn. Concerns over the size of the redesigned stadium and an argument over non-football activities were said to be behind Greenwich Council's decision to reject planning permission to redevelop the stadium.
The council almost certainly didn't know at that time what it had let itself in for. There were council elections in May 1990, and Charlton supporters, led by Rick Everitt, the editor of the Voice of the Valley fanzine, hastily arranged themselves into The Valley Party, a political party which described itself as being “with no political ideology, no personal ambition and very little substance”.
They sought nothing but to embarrass the council. With the support of the local newspaper, the Mercury, they fielded candidates across the 60-seat election. An open-topped bus drove the borough covered in “Vote Valley” banners, a robin canvassed shoppers in Woolwich, and three different election leaflets were posted throughout the borough to every single house.
Billboard posters were put up across the borough with striking images, such as a picture of a young child alongside the caption, “If you don't support us, who is he going to support?”, or a picture of an open-top bus celebration alongside the caption, “If the council has its way, we'll never see this sort of traffic problem again”.
And it worked. The Valley Party ate into the Labour Party vote and hampered the re-election bids of several prominent councillors. One of the councillors who lost his seat was the chair of the council's planning committee, the body which had rejected the redevelopment plans for it in the first place.
The Valley Party couldn't manage to nab a councillor's seat on the night of the 3rd May 1990, but their performance that evening was remarkable nevertheless. They picked up 14,838 votes, 10.9% of the total electorate. It was a vote of confidence in the club from its local community, especially bearing in mind that, like many London clubs, a sizable proportion of the club's support now came from outside the borough itself. Despite this, the council had little alternative but to sit up and take notice. The following year, planning permission was given for The Valley to be redeveloped.
Planning permission may have been granted to redevelop, but money was still tight. In the summer of 1991, the club did move to a new home, but it was another temporary one, the Boleyn Ground, home of West Ham United. It still wasn't Charlton, but it was marginally better than Selhurst Park.
In the summer of 1992, the club launched The Valley Investment Plan, which offered 10 years' worth of reduced or free season tickets in return for upfront payment to the club. The supporters responded positively to this, raising £1.1m towards a total renovation cost of £4.5m. A grant from the Football Trust covered a further £1m towards the cost, and the club's directors put in the rest.
Football's brave new world kicked off in August 1992, with Charlton still in the second tier and still playing away from home. Before the end of the year, however, The Valley was ready for use, even if parts of it remained a mess of temporary cabins. On the 5th December 1992, the club marked their return with a 1-0 win against Portsmouth in front of a crowd of 8,337 people and the cameras of London Weekend Television, who afforded the match extended highlights that weekend.
Over the course of the previous seven years, it had often felt as though there was no way that Charlton Athletic could ever return to The Valley. To a great extent, the move to Selhurst Park felt like an extended death sentence. But Charlton made it - a club which in 1985, under ownership too cowardly to do it any other way, didn't even tell its supporters that it was moving seven miles away from home until the very last minute.
But Charlton were reborn by adversity. By the time of the 1990 local council elections, Charlton's supporters were indistinguishable from the club itself. Run down and neglected for decades by the owners, what they achieved that year was no less than miraculous. When the great and the good were found to be wanting, the supporters came through.
Protest has become part of the background noise of football in recent years, but the supporters of this club provided a template for how lawful direct action can rescue a club. Other battles to be fought at other clubs would lean heavily on Charlton's uprising as a template for how to engage with a local community, how to mobilise, publicise and get your message across.
It's also worth remembering that the repackaging of football fans as a commodity had barely even begun in 1990. At that time, the public perception of the football supporters still portrayed them as troglodytes. Charlton supporters had an uphill battle to fight, not only in terms of the logistical obstacles in way of getting the club back to The Valley against the backdrop of the dire financial state of the game in this country at the time, but also in terms of defying the negative received wisdom of who football supporters actually were.
Charlton Athletic didn't stroll off into some form of utopian sunset. The club made it into the Premier League in 1998 and stayed there for eight of the next nine years. But the period after this saw decline, and the largely malign effects of both Roland Duchatelet and his successors saw protest return to The Valley. The portable cabins left The Valley long ago. It holds 27,000 people these days, although plans to increase this to 40,000 were scrapped when the club were relegated from the Premier League in 2007.
But if there is one lesson to be learnt about the club's experiences from the 1980s and the early 1990s, it must surely be that this is a club that cannot lightly be written off. In saving their own club, the supporters of Charlton Athletic created a template for protest, which continues to influence the supporters of other clubs to this day.
Accompanying image from Wiki Commons, used under CC-license 4.0