How south London became a talent factory for Black British footballers

In the beginning I remember Saturday training sessions on the rec, sprawling green fields and the rolling hill we climbed like a mountain. I remember Golas moulded around size-four feet and metal studs screwed into Umbro soles. Mesh bibs and Mitre footballs. Part-time coaches and passing drills.

More than two decades have passed. But I still remember how things were back then. How we gathered on crisp Saturday mornings, seven-year-olds cut loose on Lewisham playing greens. We were young kids pulled into a sport handed down through the local family network, a Lewisham tradition slowly becoming our own, the crossfade of football and Saturday mornings shifting into ritual. Every generation just following the last. I still remember those weekends, still see the grass, the pitches where we were baptised. I still remember Hilly Fields. I still remember south London.

Hillyfielders FC was my childhood football club. Hilly Fields was where I played my first game. Thirty acres of open grass, thick tree lining and tennis courts, a sprawling grass junction in the blue borough, with Brockley and Ladywell and Lewisham Central quietly lapping at its sea-green shores. It is wide parkland carved into residential sprawl, besieged by rows of Victorian and terraced housing. It is the jewel of a concrete town, raised 175 feet above sea level. From our Everest you can stare down towards the skyscrapers of the city skyline and see steel mountains rising from the earth, glistening along a glass-panelled shorefront.

Sometime in the late 1990s, Ron Bell, a local coach and the uncle of a boy from our estate, began running training sessions, gathering flocks of south London infants in the park. Young boys dragged into the ritual by fathers who