On the borders of hope and New Year resolution, Trust Board member Dr Paul Breen writes about the need for The White Swan pub in Charlton Village to be returned to its former glories.
Trips down memory lane are supposed to be pleasant affairs. However, a walk around the back of The White Swan pub this afternoon on New Year's Eve brought with it a haunting sense of loss at the slow, inexorable drift of a community landmark towards a point of deterioration on the borders of no return. Much like I imagine it felt for fans of Charlton who were around during the dark days of a derelict Valley. I went inside the pub grounds upon seeing the back entrance opened up, wandering in like a curious cat to a place so abandoned it now seems fit for no more than hosting music nights for mice - a far cry from what it was not so long ago - a beating heart of activity not just for the local community but for all those including Charlton fans who travelled far and wide to savour the special atmosphere in this place.
All of us have special memories of being there and mine include a book launch and gatherings of CAST or CARD members at various events upstairs, including the momentous, Museum-led showing of a film about Jimmy Seed as part of the annual Charlton and Woolwich Film Festival. Added to that, it used to be so marvellous to meet up with people before and after a game, to go there for dinner and drinks, knowing that the place would be crowded with Addicks from as many places, suburbs and shires as it's possible to see from the top of Severndroog Castle.
Therefore, it was gut-wrenching to find myself standing in the remnants of an empty beer garden, looking at the boarded up facade of a place that had once known the fever pitch of life not just on match days but in live music sessions, nights of DJs at the decks, charity pub quizzes, beer festivals, London marathon breakfasts and foodie evenings catering to all tastes. These included Sunday roasts, vegan pop-up midweek feasts, and pizzas washed down with craft ales out in the sun by the willow tree. There were other vital community events too like coffee mornings for mums that gave such a momentum to social interactions in wider society, schools and so on. This pub was very much a hub of community life so to see it decked out in an unseasonal tinsel of razor wire streaming across the broken barricades was Christmas-crushing. Like stepping into a house with a chimney blocked off to Santa!
Even the stairs that once led to the top floors have been amputated in such a way that a couple of metal stumps remain, hanging there, almost-lifeless, as if in a metaphor of what The White Swan has become. It's a place that's not yet quite dead but being left to decay in a slow state of gangrene; crippled by the Catch 22 of lying empty, exposed to the elements, whilst simultaneously and idiosyncratically being offered for rent as a functioning pub by owners investing nothing on the building. And yes, gangrene is a horrible and visceral image but that's what it felt like when seeing the state of decay from the top of the stumped staircase to the rotting cellar wood at my feet.
And strangely, or perhaps naturally as a Charlton Athletic fan, it wasn't the broken windows or the barbed wire or even the blocked-off beautiful old willow tree waiting for the hatchet that choked me up the most, stirring up a cocktail of memories and emotions in my soul. It was the image in the picture alongside the headline of this story - a snapshot of time encapsulated in a fixture list.
It was that fixture list which hit me in the guts, knocking the wind out of me, as if a security guard the size of Tyson Fury had just stepped out of the pub's shell and winded me with a punch (below the belt). Momentarily, a whole series of pictures flashed before my eyes - a list of games that spanned the autumn, winter and spring of 2019-20 before all time seemed to evaporate into the haze of a pandemic and the world became a meridian between two time zones, before Covid and everything else during and after. I could see names written in chalk of games that stretched across that 2019/20 season when Charlton were playing in the Championship, having won promotion a few glorious months before despite all of our stifling ownership issues. And here I was staring into a kind of Addicks' Championship Diary of 2019/20 when the future looked rosy as Lee Bowyer's cheeks. There it was - scripted in black n' white lettering as a surviving relic of halcyon days in the not so distant past.
The writing on the wall (of The Swan beer garden) began away to Millwall on the 9th of November, moving slowly through Cardiff and Luton down towards Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough. I had travelled to Teeside that December day, the last time I went up there, last time we went up there as a club, unaware that within months we wouldn't be able to go anywhere. But there I was in The White Swan garden lost in memories of the Riverside and a time when teams of that level were coming to visit us on match days: one league down from the very best in the country, arguably the best in Europe and the world. As I moved on to Hull and QPR, I came eventually to Bristol City on Boxing Day when I had bought tickets for American cousins, in the posh seats. That chilly afternoon, we'd gone into the pub to warm ourselves at that characteristic open fire crackling in the corner, roaring loud as The Covered End choir in full voice on a match day. Then I brought the Americans down the hill as part of the traditional 2.30pm exodus from the village pubs to watch the 'soccer', where thankfully they got to watch us win a five-goal thriller, maybe in the rain if my memory serves me right.
By now in the ghostly beer garden maybe it was also starting to rain because the lettering was starting to blur as if a steam had built up on the chalk that must have been pretty sturdy stuff because it seemed to be the only thing that survived perfectly intact through the intervening years of abandonment. But the chalk wasn't running. It was the blur that had come to my own vision because I've no shame in admitting that the cocktail of memories, loss and regret brought tears to my eyes.
Those memories were coming thick and fast as the goals of Lyle Taylor that season - with the punch of a Patrick Bauer header. We had closed out the calendar year in Derby as I reminisced. The more I reflected, the faster I began to read for fear somebody in the flats above would phone the emergency services and say there was a madman almost weeping like a willow in the derelict pub's garden below their window. Names floated by me like a Who's Who of Championship Regulars, with Fulham and Nottingham Forest in the midst of them, showing that glorious reincarnations are indeed possible.
And then the lettering crept slowly downwards to where we beat Luton 3-1 in February 2020 as Covid 19 swept across the planet and we headed northwards for trips to Sheffield Wednesday and Huddersfield. That was my first and only trip to the famous Hillsborough Stadium where I arrived late and left early after staying apart from the other away fans in a sparsely-populated corner, not because of Covid, but because I'd gone through minor surgery a few weeks before. There was a particular poignancy to the night though and to the game I was thinking of via The White Swan's lettering.
Soon after the Sheffield trip we as a club lost Seb Lewis, possibly our greatest fan of all time. And the country as a whole lost so much too. The world also. But for me in those moments of looking at the fixture list I felt a brief pang of what others may feel when they look at The National Covid Memorial Wall opposite the Houses of Parliament. I'm not of course comparing the two things. The crumbling of brick and mortar doesn't compare to human grief at the loss of flesh and bone, but a whole plethora of emotions truly overwhelmed me in those moments of being in The White Swan garden.
And that's why I want to see it open again, hoping that happens in 2025. Charlton Athletic managed to resurrect The Valley from the weeds and brambles of neglect. Then of course the fight was against Greenwich Council. The opponent had a face and Council elections offered Valley Party candidates a reasonably fair and equitable battleground on which they could mobilise support for their cause. Here, on this ruined battleground, we are against a much more faceless opponent as I and others such as Darryl Chamberlain and John Lubbock have written about in the past. But I believe the Charlton community can achieve a result on this front if we keep exerting pressure, fighting against the odds, a bit like Jack Charlton's Ireland of the 1980s or Nottingham Forest this season.
The Charlton Society have been fighting this cause for years and in the most recent MODMAG Darryl presents a vision of what The White Swan Music and Arts group have proposed as a game plan for victory and that's worth supporting for the sake of the club and the community, as is the petition they've organised. The more signatures on that, the higher up the calls for change might be heard. In Ireland there's a saying that night is darkest just before the dawn and in The Swan's case, support is needed now so that when the eventual tipping point in this battle is reached, those on the frontline will have an arsenal of documented support to back up their cause. A united Charlton is just part of the battle of course. There are other variables at play here, including political and economic factors.
It's important to remember that the now-historic fixture list in the pub garden runs to a point in time where The White Swan had already closed. It wasn't Covid that clipped the Swan's wings in mid-flight. It was extortionate rents. And maybe also to a lesser extent this grand old pub was another victim of the falling attendances that Britain's local pubs have sadly suffered in recent years. Partly that's because of cheap booze being so readily available in supermarkets. But it's also happening because of so little government assistance and protection for the pub industry in recent decades.
My last visit there was on Sunday 19th January 2020 when I brought an English work colleague and a visitor from Shenzhen in China to savour the Swan's atmosphere after giving them a grand tour of Greenwich and Charlton. They'd been given an admittedly biased exterior tour of South London's finest football club - as important a part of their sightseeing trip as anything else in Greenwich, even if these days we can't quite guarantee seeing the same amount of stars at The Valley as in The Royal Observatory. After our tour we went to The White Swan as a last showcase of Charlton life, without realising that this was also to be the Swan's last night on the stage.
The others went home after a couple of drinks by the fireside, having loved the quaintness of a pub that offered so much that was pleasing to the eye, pleasing to the palate and pleasing to the senses in general, particularly in the ambience. Meanwhile, I went down the road to The Bugle Horn to see the last minutes of Liverpool's 2020 title winning team beating Manchester United because there was no football shown in the Swan except rarely. That to my mind was always an Achilles Heel, not because of a reluctance to show football but more of a rejection of the rougher elements of what football culture is seen to represent, even though the pub benefitted greatly from the economics and the atmosphere of match days at The Valley. And again I repeat very strongly that it was extortionate rents which ensured closure of The White Swan more than anything else, but football and the culture around it, especially the working-class culture that reflects a lot of the local demographic, also has to be incorporated into any future business plan for the regeneration of this invaluable community pub.
That's why we as Charlton fans have a part to play in this fight whatever direction it takes. And like the club too, a sustainable Swan also needs to reflect the rich diversity of its surroundings, being a welcoming space for all, regardless of class, creed, culture or any other degree of difference.
And so as my 2024 ended on a strange note, a melancholy trip down memory lane, a new year and a new hope begins. It was the sight of that fixture list preserved intact like a Statue of Liberty in the original Planet of the Apes which has inspired me to write this, to imagine a better future for a pub that's a shadow of what it was. It's also a shadow of what The Valley once was before recovering thanks to the community pulling together. The same can happen in this case. Then the Covid-era memories will be erased and new Championship fixtures take their place, sooner rather than later. We really need to see The White Swan as a permanent fixture in the life of the Charlton community in coming years and I believe that we will see it. The White Swan will take flight again in some happier new year and years to come. With a combination of music nights and choruses of Valley Floyd Road on match days, as in times before, this caged bird will sing again at the heart of Charlton life.
If you are not already among the 2,500 Charlton supporters who are members of CAST, do join today - it only costs £5 annually.