Words & Pictures to follow: Ilford vs Benfleet
It's time for the final instalment of my brief sojourn into Essex, and just as it has been with a couple of these other trips this season... it's complicated.
As one chapter ends, so another begins. This season was supposed to be different for me. After having wrung Sussex’s non-league football scene practically dry last season, the plan had been to get on with seeing a bit of London this season. But life got in the way. My girlfriend, a resident of the capital since 1995, was put in a position in which she had to return to the Essex of her childhood at the end of November, and this meant that we both had reschedule a lot of different aspects of our lives.
In one sense, then, London would have to wait, and true enough in the weeks since then we’ve been to Billericay, Chelmsford and Brentwood Town in the pursuit of a non-league football fix. But it’s now getting on towards the end of February and it’s time for the final chapter—for now—in this mini-sub-series and we actually have to go back a little further in time than the start of this series to make the circle complete, because the dividing line between East London and Essex isn’t always completely clear.
Prior to all of this enforced relocation nonsense, we’d already started exploring that fuzzy line. In October we went to Walthamstow, where it rained a lot, and to Redbridge, where we saw possibly the most entertaining game that we’ll see all season. So in a sense, it makes perfect sense to end this series with a journey to another leg of the unwieldy beast that the non-league game became in this neck of the woods throughout the 1980s and the 1990s.
There’s an entirely practical reason for the selection that I’ve made for this weekend. For the last time—for now—I will be in Shenfield this weekend, and Ilford Football Club is twenty minutes on the Lizzy line and an extremely short walk from the station. And the key matter here is cost. I’ve lost almost a thousand pounds a month’s worth of freelance writing work since last summer. I can, to put it bluntly, no longer afford to get to a game every single weekend. It just so happens that the combined train fare and entrance fee for this game should come to less than £15, and that’s an amount that I can just about withstand.
So who are Ilford Football Club, and how do they fit into the convoluted story of non-league football on the East London/Essex border? The first thing to mention is that this is not the original Ilford Football Club. That one was formed in 1881, played in the Southern League, and then joined the Isthmian League as founder members in 1905. The post-WW1 years were their most successful, with the club winning the Isthmian League in 1921 and 1922, as well as the FA Amateur Cup in 1929 and 1930.
They were one of the better known names in the non-league game, and the same could be said for their ground at Lynn Road, near Newbury Park. With a capacity of 18,000, it held matches at the 1948 Olympic Games, amateur international matches, and even the 1909 FA Amateur Cup Final. Ilford FC, meanwhile, remained amateur to the very end, even appearing in the final Amateur Cup final in 1974, in which they were beaten 4-1 by Bishop’s Stortford.
The club had high falutin’ plans for a new stadium near Fairlop, but these quickly fell apart. At the end of the 1976/77 season Ilford left Lynn Road, and that summer the main stand was dismantled ready for transportation to the new site, while the other was put up for sale. The club made arrangements to share with Leytonstone FC at their Granleigh Road ground while the new stadium was being built, but this never came to pass. It came to pass that the club had not taken account of Land Development Tax when budgeting for their new home. Of the £325,000 raised from the sale of Lynn Road, £112,000 had to be paid in tax. That new home would never come to pass, and in 1979 Leytonstone and Ilford merged.
That club would eventually form part of Dagenham & Redbridge, but Ilford Football Club would live to fight another day. In 1987 a new club was formed, but life would be a struggle. They would be forced to withdraw from playing altogether more than once before finally getting themselves onto a firmer footing, eventually winning promotion into the Isthmian League and winning its Division Two title in 2005.
But that league title would be something of a turning point as well. Over the 17 seasons since then—bearing in mind that two were knocked out altogether by the pandemic—Ilford have broadly speaking been terrible. The next eight seasons would see them finish 20th, 21st or 22nd on six occasions. It is to a great extent surprising that any football club could keep going through this sort of period.
An eventual relegation back into the Essex Senior League in 2013 finally ended that run, but life hasn’t been much simpler for them since then. They’ve been at this level ever since, but the seasons following the pandemic have seen them finish 16th, 16th and 19th in the ESL; not the sort of form that seems likely to get them back towards their Isthmian League glory days.
The new club does have a home at the Cricklefield Stadium, just a short walk from the location of the old ground, but even this has been fractious, over the years. As recently as 2023 the club was kicked out of the ground following a dispute over the lease to parts of it and after they themselves had kicked out Barkingside, with whom they’d been sharing it.
They’re back there now, but attendances have been a struggle. They’ve only broken three figures a couple of times this season, and 87 people turned out for their last home match, against Great Wakering Rovers. Still, after having finished 19th out of twenty at the end of last season, at least they’re doing a little better on the pitch this time around; they’ll be 12th in the table, going into this fixture.
Their opponents on this particular Saturday afternoon are Benfleet, who are new arrivals in this league following promotion as champions of the Eastern Counties League Division One South at the end of last season. They’re currently in 14th place in the table, two below Ilford. And the two teams have already met this season in their second league fixture at the end of July, with Benfleet winning 6-3.
The club don’t have much of a history of success, having played intermediate level football for much of their history before making the jump up from the Essex Olympian League to the Eastern Counties in 2018. The result of this is that they’ve only been playing in the FA Vase since 2019/20, while this season was only the second time in their history that they’d ever played in the FA Cup, too.
Benfleet is divided two adjacent villages called South Benfleet and North Benfleet. A couple of miles south-east of Basildon, it’s on the very south side of Essex on the Thames estuary, on the train line to Southend-on-Sea. If anything the railway station there is best-known as your alighting point for nearby Canvey Island, which doesn’t have a railway station of its own. I have some tales from that neck of the woods, but those are for another time.
And I should add that this match does come with a personal caveat, for me. The day before this match is going to be an extremely long one for me for reasons that I’m not going to be explaining here, and with the absolute best will in the world I cannot 100% guarantee that I’m going to be in any condition to make this trip. I’ve chosen to write this up on the assumption that I will, but I do have to accept that this particular trip may not feel as attractive to me by Saturday lunchtime as it does right here and right now, to the point that it could be impossible.
It’s time to say arrivederci to Essex for a while. For reasons that are nothing to do with non-league football—or me, really, in a practical sense—this is a good thing, and I already have plans for the rest of the season back in London, Surrey and Sussex, so long as I can get my income to something above a barely-subsistence level. But for now, let’s all just assume that everything is going to be okay and that by Saturday lunchtime I’ll be on my way. Words and pictures should follow, on Sunday.