Heading up the hill, past the parade of shops and fast-food takeaways, you find yourself wondering how many people have passed through these unpretentious, terraced streets without knowing the football history.
If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you could walk this route from Plumstead railway station without ever appreciating what links this piece of suburbia, in a quiet corner of south-east London, to the football club currently at the top of the Premier League table.
Advertisement
The first clue is from peering over the wall on Mineral Street (when you find out more, you come to realise why it has that name) into the nearest gardens.
It’s tricky, though. That wall is higher than most of those on surrounding streets and you need to be pretty tall to see what’s behind it. You could stand on tiptoes, or even bring a stepladder. You might be able to make out what you came to see, behind the children’s swing, rotary clotheslines and various bits of garden furniture. But nobody wants to be a snoop, do they?
No, the best views are only available if you turn right into Hector Street and find someone kind enough to let you into their back garden to see, close-up, why this is not just your ordinary plot of land.
Dinesh, for example, at No 39 has had quite a few knocks at the door in recent years. So has Mrs Patel a few houses up, as well as various other neighbours.
This is the site of the old Invicta Ground, Arsenal’s home stadium from 1890 to 1893, and the large concrete steps in these back gardens are the remains of the terraces where thousands used to stand to cheer on the predecessors to Cliff Bastin, Thierry Henry, Ian Wright, Bukayo Saka and everybody else who has worn that famous red-and-white shirt in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Why were these terraces not fully demolished with the rest of the ground? That’s a good question, and when The Athletic visited recently, there was nobody in Hector Street who could explain why they have survived the passage of time.
All that can really be said with certainty is that they are in astonishingly good nick, bearing in mind it has been 132 years since Royal Arsenal, as they were known, played their last match here and this site ceased being a football stadium.
“Historically, it’s so exciting,” says Nicola White, one of those visitors to Hector Street over the past few years. “It’s wonderful to think that people used to stand on these terraces to watch Arsenal — the excitement, the noise, the crowds — and that they are still here, almost like a historical monument, in these back gardens.”
Advertisement
To introduce Nicola properly, she is an artist, beachcomber and mudlarker who spends a lot of her time foraging along London’s River Thames, and found herself being drawn to Hector Street as a result of one of her finds in the summer of 2022.
It’s a wonderful story, covered in more depth here.
“Sometimes when you are wandering along the mud at low tide, looking left and right, you see something which makes your heart leap,” she says. “This is what happened… I saw something gleaming in the sunlight.”
That something was a bottle with the words ‘G. P. Weaver — Plumstead’ embossed on the glass. And the significance, as Nicola discovered from internet searches, was that George Pike Weaver was the hotelier, victualler and owner of the Weaver Mineral Water Company, who also happened to be Arsenal’s landlord at the Invicta Ground.
Intrigued, Nicola headed to Plumstead with her son, Angelo, to see if it was true that part of the Invicta had survived all these years and “after peeking over a few garden fences, I had a hunch we may have found what we were looking for”.
The first family she approached were nonplussed, politely explaining they had no idea what she was talking about. But the next homeowner welcomed her and Angelo into their back garden. It was, says Nicola, “like a portal to the past, allowing us to imagine ourselves watching an Arsenal game back in 1890”.
The first game at the Invicta Ground was a friendly against the 93rd Highlanders, an army team, on September 6, 1890, attracting 7,000 spectators. The following month, the two sides met there again in front of a 10,000 crowd. The record attendance came two years later, when 12,000 witnessed a 3-2 win for Royal Arsenal against Millwall Athletic in the FA Cup.
“The working classes were found primarily in the general ground area and, if feeling flush, would have spent an extra three pence to stand on the concrete terraces rather than the dense mud at the Invicta Ground,” according to the 2022 book, Royal Arsenal, Champions of the South, written by historians Mark Andrews and Andy Kelly, and editor Tim Stillman.
Advertisement
“The scene at the start of the first game was, by all accounts, one of splendour. The grandstand was draped with red cloth, decorated with trophies of flags and streamers were hung from the flagstaff.”
And now? Hypothetical, perhaps, but Arsenal’s future might have been altogether different if Weaver had not tried to hike up the Invicta’s rent, from £200 a year to more like £400, in what appears to have been an attempt to exploit the club’s 1893 election into the Football League.
The club could not afford to pay that much and moved back to their old Manor Ground home, which was almost directly opposite. Nobody else was willing to pay what Weaver wanted either, and the Invicta was eventually knocked down for houses to go up on the site.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Royal Arsenal would change their name again to Woolwich Arsenal in 1893 before becoming the plain, single-name Arsenal and moving across the Thames to north London, initially to Highbury in 1913 and then the club’s current home, the Emirates Stadium, in 2006.
Stillman writes in the book how he has “daydreamed on many occasions at how some of Arsenal’s alternate realities might have looked. What if they had been forced to swallow the surging rent at the Invicta Ground? Would Arsenal have tumbled into total irrelevance? Even extinction?”
These days, if you are in Plumstead and want to see a team playing in red and white, you are closer to Charlton Athletic, a club in the second-tier Championship whose stadium The Valley is two miles away, than the home of the Premier League leaders.
But there are other reminders of Arsenal’s past still in plain view if you look hard enough — especially if you fancy a tour of the local pubs.
The Star, on Jago Road, is where the players used to change before going out for their first football matches, which were staged on Plumstead Common’s cricket pitch. The Prince of Wales, where the club were first formed as Dial Square in 1886, is now a hostel.
Jock Craib, chairman of Woolwich Arsenal in 1910, was the landlord of The Who’d A Thought It pub. And don’t forget the unusual history of the Lord Raglan, where the team’s first centre-back, Richard Price, destroyed their first-year records in what has been described as “drunken revelry”. Who’d A Thought It, indeed.
Advertisement
As for Hector Street, those solid old concrete terraces might still be there, you fancy, in another 130 years, jutting up from the ground like the remains of a Roman amphitheatre. Put a cushion or two down and they could make a nice garden bench.
And if you are wondering about the ground’s name, that feels apt for the modern Arsenal, too.
Invicta was once the motto for the county of Kent, which borders south-east London and is just a few miles away. It is also the Latin for ‘invincible’, ‘undefeated’ or ‘unconquered’ (though there are records of Royal Arsenal being thrashed 8-1 there in 1891 by The Wednesday, who would become the Sheffield Wednesday of today).
So here, you could say, played Arsenal’s first Invincibles, long before Arsene Wenger’s 2003-04 team, unbeaten throughout an entire 38-match Premier League season, took that title.
