North London Forever
After the Invincibles won the league in 2004, the victory parade passed close to my home. The open-topped buses rolled down from Highbury Stadium through Highbury Barn and past the garden of the Alwyne Castle pub, and then on round Highbury Corner to Upper Street and the Islington Town Hall. Watching that parade from the pub garden is one of my earliest memories; I had a red plastic horn that hurt my teeth because I had to bite down so hard on it to make a sound. Two years later, after Arsenal had reached the final of the Champions League, my dad and I went to the first game at the new stadium. I was six years old: I didn’t realise I was witnessing the beginning of an era of perennial disappointment.
But after fifteen years of failure (compared to the successes of the ’90s and early 2000s), Arsenal is back: Mikel Arteta’s side will be top of the league at Christmas. However, I’m going to leave the performances on the pitch to one side for now, and focus instead on the relationship the club has with its fans and local community. I think this relationship has been transformed over the last few years in a way that sheds light on some fascinating social issues. In this essay, I’m going to explore the experience of being an Arsenal supporter living in North London right now.
Paradoxically, the culture around Arsenal is both top-down and bottom-up; bottom-up, because it is built on the passion (and money) of ordinary people, but top-down because it’s driven by corporate marketing campaigns and executive decisions. There’s also a clash between the local and the global - the stadium and the local community, versus the foreign owners and fanbase. We can think about this as an alignment chart, and maybe all football clubs - all forms of fandom? - fall somewhere on that matrix. The dialectic between these factors drives events and shapes culture - for instance, I think the European Super League is best viewed in these terms. So what’s the dominant theme at Arsenal right now?
The club has made a huge effort from the top down to engage with fans and the local community. Recent Adidas kit launch videos place stars among ordinary people and places - a sharp contrast with the branding in, for example, PSG’s latest launch video, which portrays the players as an untouchable elite. Few giant clubs are choosing emphasise the local over the global.
Through their Arsenal Supporting Supporters campaign, the club has partnered with local businesses like the Chip Inn Fish Bar, while the No More Red campaign against knife crime enlisted Idris Elba to advocate for change in the community, and the club runs many other charitable projects to help local people.
The marketing effort extends to the women’s club, who recently sold 50,000 tickets for their game against Spurs: Lotte Wubben-Moy, a Hackney native, put out a video about the importance to her of home, and on the men’s side, Bukayo Saka has put out something similar. Perhaps the most iconic moment came from the Amazon All or Nothing documentary which followed the club through the 2021/22 season: an impassioned speech by the club’s veteran photographer before the North London Derby embodies exactly the emotions the club has been working to generate.
A cynic might call Arsenal’s efforts at cultural production astroturfing (i.e. fake grassroots) - artificial simulation of bottom-up culture from the top down. But the opposite of astroturfing is authenticity, which I think comes from alignment between the interests and culture of the top and the bottom, as well as the global and the local. When the fans and the owners are aligned, they can each produce authentic culture; astroturfing happens when their interests and priorities are different. So even though the sense of community has been deliberately produced, I think it’s about as authentic an expression of bottom-up, local-community-driven culture as one sees these days, especially at the scale of a football club. Even when Arsenal acknowledges their global fanbase, as they did in the Little Islington kit launch video, local differences are placed in the foreground: let a thousand flowers bloom. Romantically, I want the culture around Arsenal to be aligned and authentic; and I think I’m justified in that by the story of the club’s new anthem, The Angel - North London Forever.
Louis Dunford’s ballad is about life in Islington, full of change and nostalgia, both realistic about the problems of the borough and sentimental about its people. I once ran into Louis by the canal just south of Angel, and in October I went to his concert in Camden. The Electric Ballroom was packed, and the waiting crowd started singing the songs you hear at the Emirates - both the classics, and a new one about current manager and former player Mikel Arteta. Halfway through his set, playing to an enthralled audience full of friends and family, Louis took a break in his set to tell a story about the song and the man himself:
“The last time I played in London actually was at the Union Chapel [on Highbury Corner]… and the next day, videos started doing the rounds on Twitter and stuff, and a couple days later I got a FaceTime call off Mr. Mikel Arteta.
And he said to me, “What do you think of us playing it at the next home game?” And I said, “Can I call you back? I’m in the middle of something.”
But, you know, I don’t want to talk about it too much, but I guess I felt that I couldn’t come out here and play it without saying, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for what you’ve done with this song, because all I did was write it; the life that it’s taken on is down to you lot.”
Louis’s story shows the alignment between Arsenal fans and management: a local artist produces a song about his community, local people love it, and the club uses official channels to transmit the song and its message to the global fanbase. Yet as he acknowledges, the song was only meant to appeal to a very small group of people.
“I wrote this next song about my home town. And when I wrote it, I thought it was so personal and specific to my friends and family, my little corner of the world, that I never dreamed that anyone would like it but us, to be honest. So you can imagine my shock at what’s happened to this tune.”
Louis makes a good point: the song is about a specific area, just a few square miles, and a particular section of the people that live there. It’s a deeply particular experience, very much his own. It’s worth noting that Louis’s experience of poverty in Islington is racially coded; his fans and his videos are overwhelmingly white, in contrast to the diversity you see at the Emirates and in the streets; the culture he describes, full of pubs and Cockney rhyming slang (Ruby Murray = curry, battle cruiser = boozer) is white working class culture. The reference to gangsters in Arthur’s Cafe show his roots in the old East End, destroyed by immigration and gentrification. I don’t think that’s a value judgement; not everything has to be ethnically diverse, and white working class culture does seem to be in retreat in Islington. But it’s striking that the song has been broadly adopted across ethnic lines, despite its very specific cultural background.
A map of Islington, with important locations marked
This is also a social story - in both North London Forever and his other songs, like When We Were Hooligans and Summer in the Manor, Louis mourns the disappearance of the Islington of his youth. This is absolutely a story about an individual getting older: but it’s also a story about an area that has changed under economic pressure. Louis’ world is small, bounded by Holloway and Finsbury Park in the north, and King’s Cross and Angel in the south; Islington and the Caledonian Road lie in the middle: as he puts it, “from the Cally to the Cross, and every shithole in between.” No area of London has changed more over the last 25 years than King’s Cross. Nowadays, it’s home to Google and Central St. Martin’s, a heavily-gentrified tech, arts, and tourism hub anchored by the three redeveloped train stations, Euston, St Pancras, and King’s Cross itself. It’s the gateway to the Soho to the south-east, and Old Street to the south-west. Yet before the redevelopment, prostitutes and ravers thrived. But of all the clubs that used to lie north of the stations, only Egg remains, while the rampant prostitution, too, has declined. For a sense of how things were, take this WordPress blog from 2012:
“Of course, there was nothing funny about the scale of prostitution in King’s Cross and the way it blighted the lives of people living there. Its reach was wide. Beyond Argyle Square, it flourished in the lonely streets behind the station, where the Director of Public Prosecutions Allan Green was cautioned for kerb crawling in 1991, and along the bleak stretch of York Way.”
Paula McGinley wrote in 1992 about the experience of meeting a prostitute in her garden just off York Way, the street that runs north from King’s Cross to the Cally Road; it’s in part a response to the Allan Green story:
“I fixed a padlock to the gate the day after I discovered a prostitute shooting up in my back yard. Squatting among the dustbins, a carrier bag clamped between her legs, she seemed more alarmed than I was. As I fumbled for my door keys she tore the syringe from her arm and mumbled: 'I'm sorry, I shouldn't be doing this here; it's your home.'
I had braced myself for a volley of expletives, a violent demand for money or, at the very least, an aggressive 'what you looking at?' - but not an apology. Few people apologise for their behaviour in King's Cross. I watched in fascination as she scrabbled for the rest of her stash, and asked, naively, if she had seen a doctor. She said it was too late, that she was forced to pick up 'fat, disgusting scum' to feed her habit.
I have lived at the southern end of Caledonian Road, in the heart of 'The Cross', for five years. I thought I was immune to most things - shrivelled condoms on my doorstep, shouts of 'how much?' as I hurry home from work, car doors flung open with a leer. But coming face to face with such despair left me shaken and depressed.
I have seen her since, waiting for a trick in the bitter cold, haranguing her pimp on street corners and buying cigarettes from a local newsagent. Squeezed into a crotch-high miniskirt, flimsy bomber jacket and plastic slingbacks, she cannot be more than 30, but her face is grey and bears the hallmarks of hard drugs and poverty.
Sex has never been so cheap or so rife in King's Cross. At one time girls working the station rarely strayed onto residential streets, but repeated police clean-up campaigns have driven vice deeper into the community. Prostitutes now ply their trade in full view of homes, offices, shops and schools. Business is brisk. Between January and August police issued more than 1,000 cautions for kerb-crawling and soliciting in the area.”
Just to the south, the Argyle Square area was home to a broad class of people who were separate from mainstream society and united by either Marxism or crime, as one “19-year-old squatter” had it:
“a disparate bunch of so-called ne’er do wells and troublemakers… In fact, amongst the drug-dens and brothels, the building was inhabited by a broad mix of people, including artists, musicians, performers, journos, techies, academics and activists determined to ensure a better quality of life for themselves. A flourishing artistic community, reaching out to the wider neighbourhood through annual festivals and parties for local pensioners, was a far cry from the supposed social dregs stigmatised by the media.“
Louis and I grew up in the same streets, but we had very different experiences there: for me, Islington Green was less about the “homeless” than the Ottolenghi a few doors down. I also spent my teenage years away from the city, at boarding school and university; but nonetheless, geography brings people together. For instance, I grew up in a posh house a stone’s throw from the Marquis Estate, which was throughout the Nineties and early 2000s one of the more violent places in London. When I was a baby, my grandfather was stabbed on our front doorstep by an opportunistic attacker hoping to break in through the open door behind him; worlds collide.
Why tell these stories? I want to share my own experience, to explain what the culture that’s been generated around Arsenal and Islington means to me; but I particularly want to talk about the fact that North London Forever does mean something to me. I think Louis was right to be surprised that other people related to it so much; and yet on reflection, that’s exactly how art like this tends to work. Stories about extraordinary individual experiences, extraordinary in the sense that very few people share them, take on a broader resonance precisely through their particularity. Great works of literature often tell stories of very unusual people, and yet nonetheless we manage to find something of ourselves in their characters. This is a paradox, and it’s almost like bathos too. I’m reminded of one of my favourite quotes, from the great German art critic Erwin Panofsky in the introduction to his Early Netherlandish Painting:
“In thus describing the direct juxtaposition of the minutiae of an interior with a vast, almost cosmic panorama, of the microscopic with the telescopic, so to speak, Fazio comes very close to the great secret of Eyckian painting: the simultaneous realization, and, in a sense, reconciliation, of the "two infinites," the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large. It is this secret that intrigued the Italians, and that always eluded them.”
So North London Forever is a song about one man’s childhood and friends, living in a particular place and space; but its specificity gives it a broader resonance that tells a universal story about childhood and belonging and nostalgia.
If North London Forever shares something with some great works of art, I think the song’s adoption by the club indicates something about culture and society. In particular, I think about Louis’s nostalgia in terms of David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere. In the book, Goodhart argued that Britain is divided into people who come from Somewhere - those rooted in a particular geography or community - and people who could come from Anywhere - urban, jet-set, highly educated, well-paid. About half the country are Somewheres - they feel a strong connection to a particular place - and about a quarter are Anywheres, not defined by that connection, with the rest falling somewhere in between.
For Goodhart, this is the crucial definition in British politics, and above all the one that explains Brexit. He cites a YouGov poll from 2011 that found 62% agreed with the proposition: “Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition, it sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me uncomfortable.” It’s these people, with their natural social conservatism, that form the Brexit-voting bloc. What’s interesting about this is that it cuts across party and class lines. There are plenty of rich, Tory-voting Somewheres, perhaps reading Roger Scruton and living in Wiltshire; but I think it also captures something about working-class Labour or even Brexit Party voters who feel strongly about their local communities; perhaps Liverpool, in its steadfast refusal to buy the Sun, or Andy Burnham’s Manchester; and it might also describe the nationalism of the SNP. Somewheres, though, aren’t by definition nationalist; that’s the wrong unit of analysis. Instead, it’s about having a strong tie to a particular place, which is often much smaller than an entire country. Louis Dunford is a Somewhere.
Goodhart’s distinction calls to mind the distinction made in 1887 by the pre-Weberian nineteenth-century German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. On the one hand, there is the Gemeinschaft, a community characterised by personal social ties, in-person interactions, and emotion or subjective feeling (which he called Wesenwille). On the other, there is the Gesellschaft, a society composed of indirect social ties and interactions that are not face to face. Instead of Wesenwille, interaction in the Gesellschaft is driven by rationality and efficiency: the Kürwille. You can use this distinction to think about charitable giving: people give to donkey shelters and sports programmes for disabled children (like the ones Arsenal run) when they’re driven by Wesenwille, and to effective altruist charities when they’re driven by Kürwille.
Arsenal, then, has gone all in on the Wesenwille of Somewheres. You can hear it in Dunford’s music, and you can see it in their focus on community outreach. It’s an interesting stance for a football club to take - most sports teams focus on Anywheres and Kürwille!
It’s worth noting, though, that Arsenal flirted with another way. The controversy over the European Super League, a replacement not for domestic football but for merit-based European club competition that would have ring-fenced places for the world’s biggest and most profitable clubs, was at heart about Somewheres and Anywheres. The proposed new competition, which Arsenal was to join, got at a fundamental tension in modern football, between the local roots of big clubs (perhaps above all Liverpool and Manchester United) and their global fan bases. Do people from Islington own Arsenal? The stadium is bedecked with flags from international fan clubs; Arsenal Malaysia, Indian Gooners, Arsenal Singapore, and so on; the sleeves say Visit Rwanda and the stomachs says Fly Emirates. If millions of people across the globe support a football club, paying for merchandise and watching games, why should it be run in the interests of those lucky enough to live in the area and go to games?
I think the success of clubs like Arsenal in eliding these tensions brings us back to Panofsky’s dictum: the infinitely big and the infinitely small are managing to coexist. That, I think, is a testament to the unifying power of a Gemeinschaft; of a community like a football club, that allows fans to feel part of something bigger than themselves, intimately and intuitively connected to everyone else in that community.
And the Gemeinschaft, I think, is essential to living well. We need these bonds of community; a significant part of 20th century literature deals with the atomization, anomie, and alienation that comes when we live purely in a Gesellschaft. Football clubs let us tap into our Wesenwille, releasing primal natural impulses. But like most things, the energy and sense of belonging that football clubs provide don’t come for free. Both the passion and community created by clubs like Arsenal have negative effects.
First, the passion around the club, combined with alcohol abuse, often leads to domestic violence: in response to the Qatar World Cup, Women’s Aid have launched the “He’s Coming Home” campaign, to emphasise the fact that “violent domestic abuse incidents increase by 38% when England lose or 26% when the team wins or draws.” Sport can provide an outlet for violent impulses, but there is always a danger that spills over into the community.
Being part of an in-group is psychologically healthy and evolutionarily necessary; but their existence necessarily also creates an out-group. If Arsenal unites people from Islington to Indonesia, then it unites them against something as well. It’s no coincidence that the most popular Arsenal chant is “What do we think of Tottenham? Shit!” You can’t really get the warm fuzzy feeling of really being an Arsenal fan, the irrational bond with all the other Arsenal fans, without engendering a similarly irrational hatred of everyone that isn’t an Arsenal fan; people from Tottenham, people from South London, people from Liverpool. You have to bite that bullet! Becoming closer to the in-group means becoming further from the out-group.
I’m sure lots of people disagree with me about this - one particular group is the effective altruists who build on the philosophy of Derek Parfit and Peter Singer. Singer’s trademark idea of the ‘Expanding Circle’ - the hopeful view of human nature that suggests that we have the potential to become more compassionate and caring over time - runs counter to my theory of in-groups. I think that it’s important for us to feel part of something, even though that necessarily implies not being part of something else. In contrast, Singer suggests an ideal where the Other, the out-group, is gradually subsumed within the circle of moral concern, until there is nothing left outside. This comes, I think, from a bald-faced refusal to acknowledge the importance of personal experience and the value that comes from Gemeinschaft.
To illustrate the point, take these extracts from the 2017 obituary Amia Srinivasan wrote for Parfit:
“[Parfit] is most famous for the view that personal identity – the conditions under which you continue to exist as you – does not, contrary to appearances, really matter. We are psychological bundles of memories, inclinations, intentions. In the future there will be bundles who will go by my name, who will share many of my memories, and act on some of my intentions. They will think they are me. At a certain point – my death – there will cease to be any such bundles, though there will be other bundles who remember me and perhaps even carry on some of my projects. From this perspective, the boundaries between ourselves and others begin to dissolve…
I wasn’t special to Derek; many philosophers, young and old, have similar stories. Sometimes I would pass by him in college and he would smile at me in a way that didn’t entirely convince me I was recognised…
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Derek didn’t see what is obvious to many others: that there are persons, non-fungible and non-interchangeable, whose immense particularity matters and is indeed the basis of, rather than a distraction from, morality. But in not seeing this, Derek was able to theorise with unusual, often breathtaking novelty, clarity and insight. He was also free to be, in some ways at least, better than the rest of us.”
Srinivasan makes an excellent point: even if an All Souls professor can live without passion and community, most people can’t - and hence the flaw in EA thinking. The great thing about football clubs, and especially Louis Dunford’s Arsenal, is the feeling they generate through embracing those things.