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Provincial football fan Ben Machell discovers fellowship in the City

Getty Images
Getty Images

It’s a cold, frosty morning and I’m on my usual foot commute, cantering past Liverpool Street station, down through the City and then over London Bridge.

Only, this morning it’s extra cold — it’s almost cold enough for your dad to sniff the air and announce that it is ‘too cold to snow’ — and so the City workers, usually so stubbornly slick, have capitulated and given in to bobble hats and scarves.

And it’s interesting, seeing them all like this. Because the first thing you notice — well, the first thing I notice — is just the sheer volume of cosy woollen accessories bearing the crests and colours of provincial football teams. It’s odd. For most of the year I see these people as steely automatons, oiling the wheels of international finance in their expensive suits and vaguely threatening heels. Only now… well… that man is wearing a Blackburn Rovers beanie. That woman is wrapped up in a Sheffield Wednesday scarf. That person’s from Bradford. That person, if my knowledge of lower-league football club crests is correct, is from Bury. Yeovil. Ipswich. Wigan. Cardiff. All represented down Bishopsgate.

I’d always assumed that these City types were just spawned in huge breeding tanks deep underneath Canary Wharf and then immediately sent to work. But there’s something instantly humanising about knowing that somebody is, like you, making a go of it in London while retaining their old sporting loyalties, still prey to the deep sorrow of a derby day loss they had no hope of even attending because it was happening 200 miles away. I let my Leeds United scarf hang out of my jacket, so that people can see it a bit better.

Ben Machell
Ben Machell

Someone in a Darlington bobble hat heads down Threadneedle Street towards the Bank of England. For some reason I find it poignant that somebody from Darlington might work at the Bank of England. Or that people from Blackburn or Bradford or Bury might be making millions in bonuses. And I think, well, good luck to them. That’s why you’re down here, I suppose. I know it’s boring, hearing provincial people in London droning on and on about the fact of their provinciality, and I’ve been guilty of it myself.

But on a freezing winter morning, it’s nice to be reminded just how many of us there are, quietly doing our bit to keep this place ticking over.