Words & Pictures to follow: Chelmsford City vs Hornchurch
Neither of these two teams seem to be going anywhere this season, but that doesn't mean that there isn't football to be played, so it's off to Essex for a not-quite-derby match.
Well, at least it's a city now. Chelmsford finally received confirmation of its city status in 2012 for the Queen’s golden jubilee, bringing to a close a long-running debate over exactly what the status of this particular place was and now is. Because as any good schoolchild knows, for a settlement to be able to describe a “city” in this country isn't straightforward.
The original cities were established in the times of Henry VIII as a tax-raising wheeze, with the first towns to be given city status being the location of cathedrals of the time. But over the hundreds of years that followed, the small matter of why cities are cities and towns are towns became more confused. City status, it came to be understood, mattered. All the big places had it and it seemed to attract greater interest—and therefore money—than just being a common or garden town.
Presumably, received wisdom by the late 1930s was that a city was effectively any town with a cathedral, but this wasn't always the case. Because when Chelmsford City Football Club were formed in 1938… Chelmsford wasn't a city. The formal legal status for being granted city status came with receipt of letters patent from the monarch, giving you permission to call yourself one, and they didn’t get that until 2012.
Of course, that only applied to official business, so a football club could call itself anything it liked, but Chelmsford Cathedral was only built in 1914. Indeed, the city itself is relatively recent. Although it's been a settlement since Roman times - we are, after all, within touching distance of ole’ Camulodunum itself, Colchester - it was only incorporated as a municipal borough in 1888 and by 1920 it's population was still less than 40,000. By the time of the 2021 census it had grown to 181,500, more than four and a half times as great.
And if Chelmsford City Football Club have changed in one significant way, it's that they have a different home to the one they used to have. I visited the old one at New Writtle Street in about 1989. It was a Proper Old Fashioned Non League Ground, with a large (and doubtless ruinously expensive to maintain) main stand, a large open terrace behind one goal with a wooden clock balanced precariously behind it, and two sides of prefabricated cover.
They lost the ground in 1997, and played at nearby Billericay Town until the start of 2006 before moving to Melbourne Park, an athletics track - uh-oh - on the edge of town - double uh-oh. Non-league football supporters in the south-east of England, particularly in and immediately surrounding London, will be very familiar with this sort of story. It’s happened repeatedly over the last few decades.
So this is a new ground for me, though I am extremely familiar with Chelmsford, since I had a girlfriend who lived there for a year about a quarter of a century ago. I’ve done the tour of the pubs and wine bars on a Friday night. I distinctly remember standing, mouth agape, at a George Michael impersonator jumping from what may or may not have been a stripper’s pole onto a bar while performing Faith in some place or other there at about 11.30 on a Friday night, on one occasion.
I’ve talked about that particuar form of Essex joie de vivre on these pages before; I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in such full force as during those months that I was in Chelmsford practically every other weekend. And it became very familiar in parts. Even now, I’m pretty certain that I could walk the route to the house that she lived in at the time without a map, though there and the town—sorry, city—centre are probably the only places I could get to without external assistance.
Because yes, not for the first time this season, this Saturday is a ground that I feel as though I should have done before in Essex but haven't. I had wondered why this might be, but the answer is obvious, really, because going from east to west in the south-east of England can be challenging, at times, and particularly between Hertfordshire and Essex without a car.
When I lived in St Albans in Hertfordshire, for example, to get to either Chelmsford or Billericay would have taken a train to St Pancras or Farringdon, the underground to Liverpool Street, and then another train out into Essex. None of those constituent moving parts are particularly complex or take very long, but they sure can make a journey look daunting.
Of course, nowadays things are different and Chelmsford from Worthing on a Saturday morning would certainly feel like a “Why am I doing this again?” moment. Fortunately, on this particular occasion I’ll be doing 90% of the journey the night before, leaving here just before five with the intention of being in (reasonably nearby, for Chelmsford) Shenfield well before the start of The Traitors.
On Saturday itself, the walk from where I’m staying to the railway station will take twice as long as the train journey itself, though this particular trip does require some degree of thinking about on account of the length of the walk at the other end, which Google Maps tells me is only a mile and a half but which does also seem to require negotiating some fairly minor roads and several junctions. On a screen it looks straightforward, but I’ve made the mistake of taking such information for granted before. It should be about a half-hour walk. Should.
As for the match itself, well, it’s National League South football between two teams who have been nothing if not inconsistent so far this season. Chelmsford and their opponents Hornchurch, last year’s Isthmian League champions, will take to the pitch in 14th and 15th place in the table respectively, having played 24 games each so far this season and having both won eight, drawn eight and lost eight.
Chelmsford are a place higher on account of their positive goal difference. Hornchurch have had the good grace to have also scored 26 and conceded 26, as well. Perfect equilibrium. It’s even a little bit of a derby game, with the two clubs both being in the same county and only just over 20 miles apart.
Despite the nothingburgerness of their league positions and the fact that I can’t quite shake from my bones the probability that this has ‘goalless draw’ written all over it, it should make for a diverting afternoon’s entertainment. There aren’t even any particularly weather warnings beyond the possibility of fog on Saturday morning. All I have to do is not get lost on the way to the ground.
Words and pictures to follow, on Sunday.