There can hardly be another city in the world as rich and varied in its sporting heritage as London, where the sights of the great festival of 2012 remain sharply imprinted, from the beach volleyball on Horse Guards Parade to the showjumping in Greenwich park and a triumphant Bradley Wiggins lounging on his throne in front of Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace. Over the Olympic Park, the thunderous cheers for Mo Farah, Jess Ennis and David Weir still seem to hang like one of William Blake’s clouds.
Going back further, the memories can be more personal and unusual. Of watching from the third-floor window of Hamleys toy shop, for example, as Nigel Mansell, David Coulthard and others revved their Formula One cars up and down a coned-off Regent Street on a warm July evening in 2004, the scream of the racing engines rattling the windows as part of a publicity stunt whose intention remained mysterious but which attracted a reported half a million spectators. If that sort of thing is ever permitted again, the cars will be electric-powered and silent.
Or of dodging a cricket ball thumped by the matchless Gordon Greenidge into the top tier of the East Stand at Stamford Bridge on the evening of 14 August 1980, when West Indies were playing Essex in the first major floodlit cricket match to be played in England. A crowd of more than 11,000 turned up, among them Henry Blofeld, then of this parish, who struggled to make himself understood over the cheers while dictating his dispatch to a Guardian copytaker some five miles away in Farringdon Road; as he passed his boiling point, the volume of his curses suggested that he might soon be able to dispense altogether with the telephone in his hand.
Or of a February night in 1999, when Zinedine Zidane, Didier Deschamps, Laurent Blanc and the rest of the newly crowned world champions emerged from a coach into the freezing air of the Kingsmeadow stadium in unfashionable Norbiton, the home of Kingstonian FC, to spend an hour warming up for a match at Wembley. A few hundred fans had turned up to stare at the players who had beaten Brazil in the final the previous summer, the fathers among them making sure their children appreciated the occasion. The following night France comfortably beat England – Seaman; Dixon, Adams, Keown, Le Saux; Beckham, Ince, Redknapp, Anderton; Shearer, Owen – by 2-0 in front of a 74,000 crowd, and Nicolas Anelka’s two goals would have been a hat-trick but for a linesman’s incorrect offside call.
It is no criticism but an indication of the subject’s rich potential to note that none of these examples rates a mention in Played in London, a survey of the physical manifestations of the capital’s sporting heritage compiled by Simon Inglis on behalf of English Heritage, and published next week. For those of the corresponding inclinations, there won’t be many more satisfying ways of spending a £25 book token this Christmas.
Inglis must be the best in the world at this sort of thing: his books on the football grounds of Britain and Europe established a reputation for blending the deep history of the game with the fascinating and hugely relevant story of its architecture. Engineering Archie, his biography of Archibald Leitch, the pre-war architect of Highbury, Old Trafford, Anfield and Craven Cottage, is another classic.
Inglis’s love of sport knows no prejudice or partiality. He is not a Londoner: born in Birmingham, he gives his allegiance to Aston Villa. The new volume continues a series that began with Played in Manchester, which older readers of this paper would probably consider to be the correct order of precedence. Played in London gives a free rein to his wide-ranging interests.
A few years ago at Herne Hill velodrome, on a Good Friday so wet that racing was abandoned, he showed me a piece of cast-iron ornamental drainpipe running up the side of the dilapidated grandstand. That piping, he told me, was probably the last vestige of the structure that had hosted the track cycling events at the 1948 Olympics. It’s there on page 320 of Played in London, part of a section reminding us that the first indoor bike races took place at Islington’s Agricultural Hall – then, in Inglis’s words, “the Earls Court and O2 of its era”, now the Business Design Centre – in 1862.
Inglis goes all the way back to the 16th century rings – known as “gardens” – built for bear and bull baiting along the south bank of the Thames, close to where the Tate Modern and the recreated Globe theatre now stand. There is still a Bear Gardens in SE1, just as there is a Cockpit Steps in the more salubrious surroundings of SW1, midway between the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, a reminder of another spectacle that became a gamblers’ favourite.
The ghosts of these places are beautifully evoked, as are those of more recent disappearances, such as White City, the multi-sports and entertainment centre built in Shepherds Bush for the 1908 Olympics. Stupidly demolished nearly 30 years ago to make space for a widely detested office block for the BBC’s ever-proliferating management, White City regularly hosted significant athletics, greyhounds, speedway and cycling events. It is where the future world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera lost to Larry Gains of Canada in 1932 and where Don Cockell won the first of two victories over Harry “Kid” Matthews in 1954, putting himself in line for a meeting with Rocky Marciano.
Even if the original facilities were obsolete, the site would have made a striking and much more convenient location for Wembley’s replacement, had vested interests not ensured that a new stadium was erected on the old footprint. The existence of a street called Dorando Close, named after Dorando Pietri, the winner of the dramatic 1908 marathon, seems an inadequate recognition of an important site.
From bear gardens to skateparks, Played in London has the lot. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to all those greyhound and speedway stadiums, or to the many historic indoor swimming pools, or marvelled at the number of cricket pitches in Dulwich, surely rivalled in their density only by tracts of South Yorkshire, or wondered why somebody took such trouble with decorative tiling to make the Temperance Billiard Hall at the end of the New Kings Road look so distinctive, then this is the place to go.
The sheer density of information and illustration means that, despite its handsome layout, Inglis’s epic is not the easiest of books to navigate. But, like London itself, it is endless fun to get lost in.
