Words & Pictures to Follow: Basildon United vs Heybridge Swifts

Remember how I promised you all that my match at Ilford a few weeks ago was my last from Essex for now? Well, like Morrissey, I didn't realise how soon now would actually be.

Well, here we all are, back in Essex. It’s a convoluted tale, how it came to this, so suffice for now to say that we are where we are, and leave it at that. And if you’re going to Essex, you might as well Essex properly. So off we go to Basildon, a town with a story which says something quite profound about what has happened to this country since 1945.

For someone who went to school in a Roman city, I’m pretty familiar with new towns. St Albans is kinda thermometer-shaped from east to west, with a long road into the city centre which runs all the way to the next town over. I grew up in a village between the two, and that next town over was Hatfield, the town centre of which was half the distance from my house, in comparison with the centre of St Albans.

The first time we went there, shortly after we moved from London to Hertfordshire in 1982, it was at my dad’s inistence because they had free parking in the town centre. I still remember that first visit. The pedestrianised town centre felt modern and fresh, and the market was bustling.

But within not much more than a decade, most of that was gone. Hatfield was an industry town. BAE were the local employers. They had 7,500 working at their huge site on the north side of the town, in a town with a population of around 40,000. There were redundancies throughout the 1980s, and in 1993 it closed for good. It kicked the shit out of the town.

It was, as skilfully laid out in the 2017 documentary New Town Utopia, a very similar story in Basildon. In the 1980s, industry left and it was never quite the same place again. The scale of all this is completely different to what happened in the Midlands and the North of England and beyond, but the defenestration of these towns was the nearest the south came to the ‘managed decline’ of the 1980s and beyond that happened elsewhere.

Hatfield and Basildon have, of course, one significant feature in common. They were both among the ten new towns designated by the government in 1945 to alleviate the housing crisis caused by the flattening of parts of major cities during the Second World War. The slums would be cleared, and there would be a bright new future for working people in new communities, with modern, affordable housing and plentiful work.

But of course, we all know what happened next. The towns were largely built to modernist designs but very tight budgets on account of the ruinous state of this country’s finances on account of the war, so it didn’t take long for them to start looking a little frayed around the edges. In the early 1980s, council housing started to be sold to those who’d lived in the houses.

With the gap between the haves and the have-nots starting to grow, the nationwide tendency towards deindustrialisation took the jobs that had been promised away, and in many towns the only answer to this loss that anyone could come up with seemed to be “MORE RETAIL!”. In the south-east of England, most of these towns would become dormitory towns for London. The idealism and optimism of the post-war era was dead and buried by the end of the 1980s.

In Hatfield this manifested itself as the Galleria, a glass temple to consumerism built on top of the A1(M) bypass tunnel that cut through the north side of the town which opened in 1991. They had an opening day for the tunnel during which the public were invited to walk through it, which I can assure you is just as strange and unsettling an experience as you’d expect, even with the full knowledge that the motorway concerned hasn’t actually opened yet. The Galleria is an outlet mall, nowadays.

I’ve had no reason to go to Hatfield in just over twenty years. After my dad’s yard closed in 1998 they bought a flat there in a small block. They lasted five years before moving to Sussex. To the best of my recollection, the tipping point came when someone spray-painted a swastika on the entrance to their block. They left in 2003, and my reasons to return to Hatfield ended with them.

But what about the football side to this? Quite asides from anything else, it’s Non-League Day, and considering that I did the first one of these fifteen (!) years ago, it’s probably right that I should be attending to one on this day. Indeed, the home team on this occasion could probably do with a bit of a boost to their attendances; their average is 109, the third-lowest in the division.

Basildon United have been representing the town since 1955, when they were formed as Armada Sports. They were founding members of the Essex Senior League in 1971, though they did play in the Isthmian League from 1981 to 1991 before returning. Their most successful period was in the late 1970s, when they won the Essex Senior League title four times in a row in the days before promotion was automatic.

Their return to the Isthmian League came as runners-up behind Great Wakering Rovers in 2017, but life hasn’t been easy since. They finished 17th twice and 14th in their first three seasons (while also losing two seasons to the pandemic), but last season saw an improvement in their fortunes, with them finishing ninth in the table.

It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that this season has been a catasrophe for the club. It started pretty well, with five straight wins, and they even led the table for a while, but then… something happened. They haven’t won since the 19th October and have picked up just four draws in the 23 league games they’ve played since then.

And if that sudden about turn in form wasn’t mysterious enough, they’ve come close too. One of those draws came against Felixstowe & Waltham United, who are in third and chasing the league title. They led Tilbury 2-0 midway through the second half and still lost. They led Sporting Bengal United by the same score at the same point and drew 2-2. They were leading Haringey Borough 3-2 away before conceding an equaliser four minutes into stoppage-time. They were leading Walthamstow 3-0 at half-time yet could only draw 3-3.

If it does all look like a bit of a mystery, trying Googling “Basildon manager sacked” and see what somes up. I believe they’re on their fourth manager of this season, having had something of a managerial revolving door for a few years, now. They lost their last match 5-1 at Redbridge, which can hardly be considered a sign that things there are about to improve.

Whatever is going on at the club certainly doesn’t seem to be doing them much good. They’re now third from bottom in the table and seven points from safety, with eight games left to play. When we consider that they’re currently on a record of 0 out of 23, the likelihood of them winning four or five of their remaining matches, which they would need to do to have anything like a feasible chance of doing so, seems pretty unlikely. Heybridge Swifts were 12th when we last saw them at Redbridge at the end of October. They’re 13th now.

Can Basildon arrest their slide, or is the Essex Senior League already winking seductively at them? Can they register a first a first league in in five months and 24 matches? Why is their badge a woman holding a baby in the air? Can Heybridge Swifts get above 12th or below 13th in the league table? Can I walk three miles through a new town to a football ground I’ve never been to before without getting absolutely, hopelessly lost?

Words and pictures to follow, on Sunday.