Eric Hobsbawm on Arsenal & the London Working Class
There is not and has never, I think, been a football team bearing the name of London. All the celebrated teams of the capital are named after neighbourhoods, except Arsenal, which moved to North London from its original location as a works club in Woolwich. They belonged to Queens Park, the hills round Crystal Palace, to Charlton, Leyton and Tottenham, or to West Ham—another team which began as a works club.
Now, this way of defining communities is directly relevant to labour movements. Out of the twenty-three metropolitan branches of the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners in the 1870s, eighteen actually had the same locality names as either music halls or football teams or both. And if we take an area like Woolwich, it was by general consent a town within a city, a defined community whose working class was based on the great Arsenal, which generated both the football club and the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society which eventually colonized other parts of London. (The other metropolitan cooperative society of importance, the London, was originally based on the railway workshops in Stratford.) And if we take West Ham, whose Thames Ironworks generated the famous ‘Hammers’ team, its character as a separate proletarian community was so marked that it was the first district in Greater London to elect a Labour majority on its council, having already, in 1892, elected the socialist Keir Hardie to Parliament by means of a coalition of the Irish with the local Left.
From New Left Review No 1/166 November/December 1987 Labour in the Great City
Eric Hobsbawm, who *may* have been an Arsenal supporter would surely have been impressed by the North London celebration of Arsenal men’s Premiership title on 31st May 2026. Not the United Kingdom which Farage tries to misrepresent with the politics of division. Guardian report below
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