DEATH OF THE DINOSAURS: the final day at Cold Blow Lane

When I was a child, my Dad subscribed to the Reader’s Digest.

For mysterious reasons, one article entitled ‘The Death of the Dinosaurs’ stuck (and remains stuck) in my mind.

It pictured a luridly drawn semi-tropical world, with a nuclear style meteorite explosion in action, with various Tyrannosaurus Rex, Pterodactyl and other less obvious creatures, including small mammals such as mice, all fleeing the rapidly expanding mushroom cloud.

I defy anyone not to see what I saw and not still have it imprinted on your memory 40 years later.

Well the message seemed clear, it would be the great beasts who perished in the apocalypse, whilst the more mobile and smaller animals would go on to inherit the Earth.

In my later-life, the post-1992 analogy with the loss of the great English football stadiums by the meteor that was the Taylor Report, was apparent.

To this day I think of the Reader’s Digest image as a kind of ‘message’ sent across time - the falling dinosaurs, represented the demise of Cold Blow Lane and the old stadia of my youth.

By contrast the mice symbolized the brave new world of retail park stadia with their Frankie & Bennie’s, their excellent motorway connections and their match day bus links to railway stations, located some three miles away.

Let me tell you about Millwall FC’s Cold Blow Lane stadium, which is to be known for the rest of this article by the ‘CBL’ moniker of my teenage years.

CBL was the rough, tough and charismatic New Cross home of the Lions since the move across the River Thames from the Isle of Dogs in 1910.

And although we were a club founded by the hard men of the West India Docks, it would be the dockers of the Surrey Commercial version who would forge the reputation of the ground as being perhaps the epitome of working class sport, all sited within the community that it served.

Famously closed four times by FA order over the 83 years of its existence, by the time of football’s own ‘great disasters’ of the mid-1980s, the CBL had developed a fearsome reputation for crowd trouble, matched with an addictive, almost compulsive electricity

‘You’ll never take the Cold Blow’ we sang pointing at the away end when they were finally given a fenced off safe area at the Ilderton Road end, though of course in the end the money men would.

As much as those of us who date from before the Sky TV era go all misty-eyed at the olden times memories, the truth was that in the post-Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough world, things were going to change - and like it or not, that would include us in London SE14 too.

The harsh truth being that a stadium with three sides of terracing and one of ancient seating cramped up alongside the back yards of the Victorian houses on Hunsdon Road, couldn’t be adapted to the demands of the Taylor Report.

Or so we were told anyway by our sheepskin wearing and vaguely roguish chairman Reg Burr.

A man responsible for the club’s greatest achievement, namely the construction of the ‘new’ Den on nearby Zampa Road, which he famously described as a long goal kick from the old ground.

But also a man guilty of nearly bankrupting the Lions by some woeful financial dealings, including a lunatic entry into the local pub business, which would play a huge part in Millwall entering administration later in the 1990s.

Perhaps Reg, rather like other great artists eg Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso or Da Vinci himself was a man whose work you could admire, without necessarily agreeing with everything they ever said, or thought ... or did.

For the CBL, the fateful decision to build the new ground was taken during 1991, alongside a deal to sell the land to Fairview, a local-authority friendly house builder of 1980s style Brookside houses, the less about which is probably for the best.

So despite Millwall not having a bad 1992-93 campaign, only fading away from the Division Two play-offs at the business end of the season in true Lions style, the truth was that a strange sense of foreboding pervaded the whole nine months.

As each game counted down to the designated finale versus Bristol Rovers, I recall it being like having a funeral off away off in the near distance, one that somehow took forever to reach.

Caught in somebody else’s photo: the author on the Halfway. Line 08.05.93

‘Final leagve game at The Den’ [sic] proclaimed the lights of the old scoreboard.

A suitably mis-spelt tribute to the highs and lows, death, destruction and mayhem that rather old ground represented in the minds of the 15,821 who were there on May 8th 1993 - including me.

The Millwall team that took the field that final day gave every impression of a group who had spent in the local boozers of New Cross and, as so often at The Den, the biggest occasions too often delivered the biggest anti-climaxes.

Despite a desire for a party in the home crowd, one chap even dressed in a pantomime lion suit and clambered over the Health and Safety nightmare of the Halfway Line’s asbestos roof, the already relegated Bristol Rovers contrived to score a convincing 3-0 win over a very sluggish Lions side.

Now my many years spent at the CBL, have convinced me of the reality of Sigmund Freud’s theories that becoming a member of a crowd, serves to unlock the unconscious mind.

As the final moments of what had become a thoroughly turgid and flat atmosphere ticked down, a kind of New Cross mass psychology took hold around the terraces.

An unspoken yet very real collective consciousness, that denied that The Den would go quietly into the night.

Nope, it would instead go out kicking and screaming in the mayhem of a pitch invasion, a tearing apart of the pitch and ripping out of every last souvenir that could be removed.

‘RIP The Den murdered by Reg Burr’ proclaimed a white blanket scrawled in painted letters and held aloft by a group of fans amidst the now packed pitch, the players having run for their lives.

A comment that always struck me as harsh on Burr, the old buffer who created so much - and yes nearly killed the club too in the Faustian process.

Did I go on the pitch you ask?

Well in the post-Taylor world of ‘being nice to paying customers’ and in the interests of avoiding impalements, the gates of the spiked medieval fencing were opened, in a manner akin to the Berlin Wall just a few years earlier.

So it seemed only polite to go on and grab myself a piece of the pitch too.

What did you do with the grass you ask again?

I took back to the flat in Bermondsey where I was living at the time. 

We had no garden, so I put it on the window-sill.

Where it stayed ... and stayed ... for a few days, until stalks started growing out of the sod.

In the end I took out to work one day and left in in a grassy area somewhere in Pimlico, a place that is forever part of Cold Blow Lane - if only it knew.

Epitaph: Cold Blow Lane was demolished over the course of 1993.
The site is now occupied by John Williams Close, SE14.