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Enchanted Tottenham

5 min read
by Ritch Grove
With the new stadium becoming ever more present, Rich Grove writes about the area, the memories and what the stadium means to all of us. Read it just for this line "We choose to belong. Our place, our history; our story has continuity."

Perhaps it’s not the easiest image to sell; that of modern day Tottenham being an enchanted land. But that’s the funny thing about the English language; it’s exactly what it is. A place bought to life each week in the heart and soul of thousands, through the voice of the crowd; en-chanted into being.

Striking at the very heart of the matter, this is pivotal to who; to what, we are. We, the masses, WE are Tottenham. There is good reason to dismiss the jarring din coming from the far end of the Seven Sisters Road as the faceless chattering that it is. A little over a Century past they claimed top billing as pioneers of the franchise by severing ties with Woolwich to take up squatters rights close to Highbury station. Woolwich Arsenal are not Highbury however, or Islington. They are not Archway, Holloway, or Ashburton Grove for that matter. They aren’t even Woolwich any more; in their own minds they are a force, an army, and perhaps like some foreign legion they are a drain on their surroundings, not a benefit to it.

Of course we are different. The place, the club, the team, the name. We belong here, our roots deep in the community and entrenched in the landscape. The famous High Cross, at the junction of Monument and High Road would have been the focal point of religious and secular meetings for as long as the community has memory. Casting from here your eye along the gentle slope of the High Road you can see today the cranes of the new stadium huddled together at the end of our processional way on the A10. The steel giants can be seen daily, dragging the architect’s lines into reality, but like some modern day temple of Megaliths White Hart Lane is hidden from view until you are nearly upon it. Its secrets and rituals are kept from the eyes of the uninvited like the within Neolithic Stone Circles of Prehistory.

[linequote]A place bought to life each week in the heart and soul of thousands, through the voice of the crowd; en-chanted into being[/linequote]

The actors of this modern secular worship; the guardian- colossus Roberts, ephemeral will o’ the wisps Ardiles, Modric, Blanchflower – lead a dance of frenzy and adoration. Here are our phantoms of the churning night; conjured to act by the gathered masters of the times – Rowe, Nicholson, Burkinshaw, Venables. Gascoigne and Hoddle, Ginola and Bale; like Pan the Greek, each in turn the Lord of some urban hunt. No midsummer night’s reverie this, the dance and fight of the players on this stage draw the hallelujah of common devotion and belonging, of solidarity and place within a breakneck world. In a way that the churches of Britain can only dream of today, Tottenham Hotspur does what it has done in the same community for over a Century, compelling people of all creeds in their thousands to sing, to chant, to belong.

Shortly after his appointment in 2004, Martin Jol spoke of the tantalisation of the club, of the feeling of it on your tongue; ‘Tottenham Hotspur’ he said, rolling the name around his mouth. ‘Even the name makes the hair on your neck stand up’. It can never be said about Woolwich, or Milton Keynes, there just isn’t a soul to be invoked in a coffee chain franchise.

Writing 100 years ago, the philosopher Max Weber warned of a ‘modernity’ invading our landscapes; how a world ever changing becomes weakened in our hearts and imaginations, a literal shadow-self of formerly loved and eulogised land- place without mystery is land literally disenchanted. Look now to the houses and apartments of Highbury, Highfield Road, Plough Lane, Roker Park. No Ball games allowed? Certainly no broiling, heaving masses. No history, no voices; each a disenchanted land, a place of what once was.

Here at Tottenham we choose to belong. Our place, our history; our story has continuity. From the manor house that stood near to the Paxton complete with drawbridge and moat – to the Lea pilots and weavers who plied their trade down the river into London, bringing trade and people back with them to the rural parish before the coming of industry and rail. From this up to the children of legend who founded the club on the High Road in 1882, our roots are deep, and neither competition on field nor the dubious money of the Norris’ of this world could drive us out.

[linequote]‘Tottenham Hotspur’ he said, rolling the name around his mouth. ‘Even the name makes the hair on your neck stand up’[/linequote]

The coming change will be as huge for the residents of Tottenham as for the people of the club. Those who live in the shadow of the club daily have already seen it, possibly so slowly at first that they barely noticed the deviation from the norm. But each in turn has come, or will soon, to the day when the changes will shift their world, and it will never be the same again. A previously unnoticed anchor or reference point in the world will no longer exist – some of them have fallen along the way already; workplaces, houses, pubs. There will be countless more, some so small and incidental that they won’t be noticed by more than one or two, others that cause the collective drawing of breath when seen.

To others, regular or more occasional visitors to the area, the change will appear more dramatic. A final song and one last shuffle along the way to Seven Sisters will come through lumped throats and be stained with tears, even the hardest hearted or resolute are unlikely to be immune. Memories shed alongside beer cans and paper napkins along Paxton Road and Park Lane, Worcester Avenue and the Bill Nicholson Way, never again to walk the memory paths of former footballing conquest.

A new world becomes us now, and we of it. Like all new arrivals, the first gasping breath is bound to be uncertain, and the birth surely not without pain. But from the first we are, and we’ll always be, Tottenham from the Lane.

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