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Bermondsey has always been a fluid, ever-changing place, tucked into the bend of the Thames, surrounded on all sides but also strangely isolated.
For hundreds of years this whole strip of land south of the city was an interlude of leisure and debauchery. In his biography of London, Peter Ackroyd mentions “bear pits, chokeholds and pleasure gardens”, as well as a thriving common industry of whalers and robbers, a place where “screaming women come out to bid farewell to thieves at dusk and wish them luck”.
Industrialization brought docks and factories. A grid of streets was laid out that still leads in a tangle to the river instead of spreading out into the standard residential grid. Through all these changes people seem to want to give new names to Bermondsey. It was called London’s Larder, then Biscuit Town, as Peek Freans, Sarson’s and Hartley’s arrived (and to this day a vinegar-soaked digestive biscuit smeared with jam remains a local delicacy).
During the Blitz, the Luftwaffe renamed the docks “Target Area G”, pretty much putting a lid on all this light industry. But even as Bermondsey adopts its latest speculative identity as New Bermondsey, a land of shiny high-rises, those ghosts are still there, transformed into the mansions of the Pickle Factory, Vinegar Plaza, Jammie Dodger Heights.
It is a process of assimilation to which it can now be applied Millwall A football club, another piece of Bermondsey history which from this week will remain in place while the neighborhood is repackaged around it.
This is good news. At a meeting of Lewisham Council on Wednesday night, the club was granted a new 999-year lease on the Den and its surrounds. It’s a major turning point in Millwall’s modern history and a good time for the council, led by new mayor Brenda Dacres, who is a good egg.
It also brings the curtain down on a difficult few years, during which the club were at one point threatened with a move to Kent if they lost that piece of ground. It’s probably worth summarizing because it was kind of wild at the time, a story about offshore trusts, gentrification, Tony Blair, community resistance, the redevelopment of London and the basic idea of how our money-draining megacities should work now.
Lewisham’s plan to compulsorily buy Millwall’s car park, the better to hand it over to a developer, first surfaced in 2012. It was covered in the local press and on supporters’ message boards. He continued to mutter indistinctly. The emerging details became more interesting. The developer, Renewal, has never done anything like this before. Its ultimate ownership was hidden behind the veil of the British Virgin Islands.
One of its original directors was (wait for it) the previous Labor mayor of Lewisham, Dave Sullivan, who denied participating in the scheme. Meanwhile, the then Labor mayor of Lewisham, Steve Bullock, had already given half a million pounds of public money to a Renewal-based charity set up to polish the development. This thing was like an onion. The more you peeled it, the more it stank.
Many people were engaged in mining in these layers. Mickey Simpson of the AMS Supporters Group and Nick Hart of Achtung! The Millwall Podcast ran an expertly curated social media campaign. An incredible cast began to cross paths: former Tory BVI minister Gary Lineker, Danny Baker, Jeremy Corbyn, the surprisingly supportive Tim Farron, the legendary ‘Swiss Tony’; a freelance financial expert who simply cannot be removed.
Strange things have happened. The charitable trust was registered at a fictional Acacia Road, also the home address of the banana-biting cartoon superhero Eric Wimp, leading to Bullock being dubbed the Mayor Bananaman (at least one Millwall fan would travel to the play-off final at Wembley dressed as a banana , for reasons that made a lot of sense at the time).
Lewisham Town Hall was besieged by flag-waving fans and news cameras for a key planning meeting. We put up a pro-Millwall candidate in the general election, Willow Winston, a local artist and one of those threatened with eviction who ended up on national television speaking out about blighted communities and preserving London’s human architecture.
And finally the scheme was shelved, a minor piece of local infrastructure management that was met with celebration and national media coverage. A subsequent independent investigation found there was no wrongdoing in the council’s actions regarding the proposed compulsory purchase.
Why is he so fired up? Some will shrug at the infamy of Millwall, a club with a reputation that reflects many of the city’s problems over the past half century. No club accumulates so many demerit points, they are all eagerly reported. No club does more to engage and tackle issues in their local area, driven by a genuinely good public trust. Different tectonic plates are found in places like these. Millwall could be a rallying point for emerging tensions. But if we’re interested in resolving some of them, then this is a good place to do it.
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Certainly the relationship between the supporters and the club is particularly visceral. This is partly because it is historic and familial, a link to the docks, the working-class communities of parents and grandparents, and to a London that, for many, is now inaccessible and cut off, a place of shiny closed surfaces and a process that goes on in the meantime.
For the club, the future now looks wide open. The new lease is a very good thing. The recent death of many loved ones chairman and benefactor John Berilson it was a big hit. But the Berilsons have retained ownership and the club is instantly more viable with its new lease, which removes old restrictions on the development of the land around the stadium.
Do you see where this is going now, sense the creeping irony? People have often tried to build things here. In the late 1970s, the then chairman unveiled plans for a ‘Super Day’ which would have included (oh, the impossible brilliance) an Asda and a bowling alley. There were protests. The super lair, the shining lair on the hill, never happened.
Now London is mercilessly hungry. The update still needs to build altered development. And someone will now develop this land around Millwall. Turns out it will be Millwall. There are fictional images of huge overhanging buildings. A strip of 10 hectares is earmarked for a 45-storey mega-tower. The thing that will finally modernize Millwall is Millwall.
Other things move too. Two days after the new lease was unveiled in a glowing statement from longtime CEO Steve Kavanagh, it was announced that longtime CEO Steve Kavanagh would be leaving, along with various other figures in the hierarchy. These things will evolve under new leadership. Who knows exactly what the future holds?
I realized some time ago that my own interest in scrutinizing every redevelopment scheme was partly nostalgic. Bermondsey remains one of the few non-homogenized spaces in central London. The old unmapped energy is still there, almost. The drive over the past few decades has been to remove all of this urban wasteland to become a single mass of monetized land.
It will happen now in the battered remains of the Biscuit City, but with Millwall still at its heart. And that’s as close to winning as anyone could get.
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