Words & Pictures to Follow: Walthamstow vs Mildenhall Town - a short history of non-league football in East London

It's complicated. Oh lord, it's complicated. But after all this time Walthamstow does at least have a football club again.

Non-league football in East London, it’s reasonable to say, is complicated. Consider, for example, the case of Dagenham & Redbridge FC. Leytonstone FC and Ilford FC merged in 1979, two years after Ilford moved to Leytonstone to share after selling their own ground and not taking into account tax when working out how much they’d have to spend on a new one. 

Leytonstone-Ilford FC were reasonably successful on the pitch, but their Granleigh Road ground was also falling down, and in 1986 they left to ground-share at Green Pond Road, the home of another club, Walthamstow Avenue. Avenue in turn were merged into Leytonstone-Ilford two years later.

But if you think we’re done there, we’re not yet. The problem was that Green Pond Road was also falling down, denying the Leytonstone-Ilford promotion into the Football Conference in 1989. That summer, Leytonstone-Ilford (Incorporating Walthamstow Avenue) changed their name to Redbridge Forest and moved to play at Victoria Road, the home of Dagenham FC. 

Two years later these two clubs merged, forming the Dagenham and Redbridge FC who still play National League football at Victoria Road to this day, albeit with a bodycount of three football clubs and three grounds having effectively been obliterated to get there. The late 1970s through to the early 1990s were a desperate time for football in this country in a general sense, and the non-league game suffered as much as the top level of the game.

At this stage, it’s important to point out that Walthamstow FC and Walthamstow Avenue FC are and were not the same club. Walthamstow’s origin story might even be more complicated than that of Dagenham & Redbridge. In the beginning, there was Leyton FC, one of London’s very oldest football clubs (and the oldest north of the river), three times winners of the Athenian League and twice winners of the FA Amateur Cup. 

In 1975, they merged with Wingate FC to form Leyton-Wingate. This remained the position until 1992, when the clubs demerged and Wingate merged with another club, Finchley FC, to form Wingate & Finchley FC, who still play to this day.

But if you think we’re done there, hooo boy, have I got news for you. Elsewhere in Walthamstow, Pennant FC had been formed in 1959, changing their name to Walthamstow Pennant upon the demise of Avenue in 1988. They merged with Leyton FC in 1995 under the name of Leyton Pennant FC, moving to Wadham Lodge, on the north side of Walthamstow. Two years later a new Leyton Football Club was established, and following a High Court case in 2002, they won the right to be recognised as a continuation of the original Leyton FC which had been formed in 1868. 

Are we done yet? No, not quite. In 2003, Leyton Pennant changed their name to Waltham Forest FC, but following the departure of the chairman and the manager in 2006 the club fell into further difficulties, and in 2008 they left Wadham Lodge to ground share with a by now reformed Ilford FC. 

Meanwhile, the reformed Leyton FC folded in 2011 after the owners were involved in a £16m VAT fraud case. Astonishingly, their original ground, the Hare & Hounds, still sits derelict to this day. In 2013, Waltham Forest moved back to Wadham Lodge, and in 2018 they changed their name to Walthamstow FC. Nowadays, they’re in the Isthmian League Division One North. So yeah, it’s complicated. And that was really the quickest way in which I could boil all of this down. 

Although the family tree is complex and fractured, the most obvious comparator for Walthamstow FC is Walthamstow Avenue, one of the powerhouse clubs of the last hurrah of amateur football in the 1950s. Between 1945 and 1961, Avenue won the Isthmian League three times, the FA Amateur Cup and London Senior Cup twice each, and the Essex Senior Cup four times. Their FA Cup exploits became legendary. In 1953 they held Manchester United to a draw at Old Trafford before losing a replay played at Highbury. Two years later they were back at Highbury again, beating Queens Park Rangers 4-0 in a First Round Second Replay. 

But the decline of the amateur game was mirrored in the decline of the Avenue. Crowds slumped to two figures by the mid-1980s, and Green Pond Road was dilapidated to the point of being unsafe, with bushes growing through the concrete of the terracing and covers so rusty that they looked at the point of collapse. Green Pond Road was a fine non-league ground and its loss was a huge loss to that area of London, but that it couldn’t continue to be used by the end of the 1980s is absolutely no surprise whatsoever. 

Of course, there is a root cause to why this sort of defenestration should have been so prevalent in London over the last half-century or so. Land value in the capital has soared to astronomical levels, and in a world in which property developers are predators, non-league football clubs are obvious prey animals, extremely cash-poor yet still sitting on relatively large pieces of increasingly valuable land. 

This sort of story has not been limited to the north-east of the city. It often feels as though there are barely London clubs who haven’t been affected by it, to some extent. From Hayes, Hillingdon and Yeading in the west, to Tooting & Mitcham United and Wimbledon in the south, to Barnet, Enfield and Hendon in the north and Dulwich Hamlet and Fisher Athletic somewhere near the centre, property developers have rinsed the city dry. Some of these clubs have merged, folded and refolded, and most have moved into a smaller, more ‘rational’ home, but the heartache was real, for those to whom it mattered.

But at the same time, most of these clubs have survived in some form or other. They’re hardier than they really have any right to be. Football in this part of London has a home, and it has a club which bears its name. They get a crowd - 200-300 seems like a reasonable estimate for what we can expect on Saturday afternoon - and they keep going. Given how volatile the history of the game in this neck of the woods has been over the last 50 years, you wouldn’t bet on things staying the way they are right now forever, but Walthamstow FC exist and they’re playing on Saturday, and that’s a start.