This is where you will find latest news and information on the project.
There’s a well-known John Green line, about falling in love the way you fall asleep – ‘slowly, and then all at once’. Falling in love with Wimbledon, is just all at once.
The ‘Wombles From The Lane’ project, set up by WiSH (Wimbledon in Sporting History) and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, is an interview-based collection of those fan love stories – the joy, pain, compromises, commitments - all in the name of a football club in Wimbledon.
Run by educational charity digital:works, a volunteer team of eight attended a week of training – visiting the Merton archives, learning about oral history, sound recording, and Wimbledon’s story - then a week of recording 24 in-depth oral history interviews, available to listen to in full, and edited into a documentary and podcast series, out in May.
We’ll also be doing vox pops interviews before the Sunderland match, so if you’re reading before kick-off, come find us!
For most of my life, football was what my grandfather loved. It was congested streets and kebab stalls in Lyon on matchdays, school a ten-minute walk from Stade de Gerland. It was the 2010 World Cup final on a ferry to Corsica, when the signal cut out seconds before Iniesta scored and we waited for the first stranger in the crowd to have breakthrough phone connection. And it was a tiny club called AFC Wimbledon that I heard about through its incredible history, whose story I followed from afar for years. Fast forward to this summer, playing football at camp in my youth worker job, awarded a ‘Best Slide Tackle of the Year’ certificate and tinfoil medal, alongside jokes about being the ‘next Harry Kane’ and ‘next Ronaldo’ (I’d choose next Jack Rudoni if I had a say, but I work amongst Arsenal, Spurs and Man United fans - they don’t know him. Yet.) Football was FUN. And then a few weeks later, September 7th, Jewish New Year, looking to mark it with something exciting, I thought, I’ve been listening to Wimbledon news on John Green’s podcast for years, I’ve realised how great football is, and I actually live in London. Why don’t I just… go?
Maybe it helped that it was a cup match so tickets were very available. Or that Wimbledon scored within the first two minutes, no time to settle and wonder what I was doing there; it started and there I was, along for the journey. Or that the final score was 5-3 (lots! of! goals!). But from that Tuesday night under the lights, it was Wombles Til I Die.
So that’s my small story of becoming a fan, coming to this community project.
Wombles from the Lane is about those small stories, and how they make the big one. As a fan-owned club, pretty big.
It’s about falling in love with a club weaving itself into our lives. And about my story, still at its very beginning, and your story - maybe ten days or weeks or years on - meeting those of other fans at various points of their Wimbledon journey. Hope to see you along the way, you Dons.
This week we conducted 26 full oral history interviews for the project and some vox pops around the ground to capture even more memories.
We kicked off the project with a history workshop from John Lynch from Wimbledon in Sporting History and a tour of the new ground ending up at the Museum.
We bolstered this information up with a visit to Merton Archives to look at their terrific collection of historical material on the club.
Back at Plough Lane we had an introduction to Oral History, it's strengths and challenges, got hands-on with the recording equipment and built up some interviewing skills. We ended the week by developing and compiling a list of questions that would form the basis of our interviews.
