Looking for advice here. My wife and I will be making the pilgrimage to Selhurst Park for the Forest match on 10/11. We want to have the full Palace experience as this is the bucket list trip and something we've been planning and saving for a few years now. With the game at 2pm, what time should we leave London (staying in the Tower Bridge/Bermondsey area)? Obviously we want to take in the whole pregame atmosphere. Clifton Arms is still the place to be? What are the chances of us getting in? What do we need to experience at or around the stadium before we go in, etc? Hopefully the construction isn't too bad yet that we miss out on anything.
And full disclosure here before I get accused of being a dumb American Johnny-Come-Lately Tourist...I became a Palace fan of May 5, 2014. I stumbled on a Premier League match between Palace and Liverpool at Selhurst on ESPN. Liverpool was at the top of the table or close to it and up 3-0. Pretty boring late, then all of a sudden Palace scored 3 goals in like 10 minutes. I never heard a stadium so loud on TV before. I decided right then that I was a Palace fan and Damien Delaney was my favorite player. Fast forward to 2021, I watched When Eagles Dare and it was the first time I really understood the club's history, and it became an obsession and I havent missed a match since. Hell, I bought season tickets two years in a row to MLS here in America and drove 100+ miles each way to Charlotte just to be able to see Wilfried Zaha play in person for Gods sake.
I don't know how many foreigners generally come to the matches, but if anyone runs into two people who look lost and have very southern American accents, please say hello.
Sorry in advance for taking up space on the board, but this is a huge deal for us, and any help is appreciated.
Obviously, take on board all the responses and advice on here. My own contribution is this:
I suggest you approach from the south (including from Selhurst station) so that you can walk along the Holmesdale Road to the ground. It’s not a big deal like walking up Wembley Way or anything, but it’s a nice approach as you can see the Holmesdale stand towering up over the neighbourhood at the end of the road, and the crowds building up ahead of you. You get a good sense of the relationship between the increasingly large and dominant stadium and the modest, slightly run down houses all around it, which is pretty typical of many traditional UK football grounds. It perhaps tells you a bit about the different economic fates that have been visited upon the two over the 100 years that they have coexisted. If nothing else, it will give you a decent sense of the place overall.
Plus, we used to sing a song about ‘Walking up the Holmesdale Road, to see the Palace Aces’, and it’s the way my dad took me for years when I was a kid. Start at the western end of Holmesdale Road where it meets Whitehorse Lane and use the railway underpass. None of it has changed since the 70s/80s, probably longer. Might be an interesting insight for you to the contents of many a Palace fans memory banks. Many of us have taken the same route for decades and its barely changed.
Generally, keep in mind a few key points:
I am led to believe that attending an American sports stadium is very different to attending an English football ground (or Selhurst, at least), in that often you cannot (and most Americans would not) walk to the stadium, which is out of town. Once you get to an American stadium, however, you have everything you need there in terms of bars, food, entertainment etc.
The opposite applies at Palace.
Hardly anybody even tries to drive to the ground, and you shouldn’t even think about it. If you get there early there are a few things to do these days, but most of us make our own entertainment enroute instead, which is both easy to do and infinitely variable as, wherever you start from, you will be making your way through a built-up, densely populated area with lots of pubs, cafes, take aways, etc. Nothing like as many pubs as there once were, but still plenty.
Remember, most of us support Palace because we grew up in the wider local area. That means on a match day many of us were drifting from pub to café to bookies to wherever on the way to or from Selhurst because we would be in those places anyway, or knew people who we might find in there. Going to the actual game was part of our normal weekend activities rather than the entire weekend activity in isolation. Both the game, and being out and about in the area, would blend into each other. Other than kick off time being set in stone the whole thing was always very organic, I found. Obviously, that can only be true if you live in the area. More to the point for you, it means there was never one main route, routine, or any particular ‘must-visit’ places pre or post-game. It was all very ad hoc and flexible.
A lot of the routines people are describing on here will be like that. If any of us goes to a particular pub or venue and finds it’s a bit packed, or too empty, or we see someone we know on the way who is going somewhere else, then we will automatically drift off to one of many alternatives without even thinking about it.
I suppose what I am saying is, don’t over-plan it. Pick a station or start point about a mile from the ground, get there at midday, then drift along as you find natural. Try one pub, if its not for you, drift on.
After the game I wouldn’t bother heading into Croydon, unless you have decided to use East Croydon station to return to London (and yes, as I’m sure you are aware, we call the centre of London ‘London’, but not our outer bit of it, even though technically it is still London).
Personally, I always liked Gipsy Hill, although I haven’t been there for years now. It’s in the right direction for you, you get a great view into London which will give you a feel of where our little corner of the world is in relation to the centre (and how little the two have to do with each other), you are a stones throw from the original Crystal Palace site from which we descend, and there used to be some decent pubs and food places.
I think I always liked that side of town, to the north of Selhurst, because of its sort of faded glamour. It was all a slightly posh suburb of London at one time, with lots of Victorian villas, typical of the sort of neighbourhood that grew up once the railways started spreading outwards from the centre in the 1850s. My own side of town, West Croydon/Thornton Heath was far more humble mostly and/or replaced with modernist grimness. Don’t go to these neighbourhoods, by the way. Its not that its totally unsafe, mostly its just a bit s***. If you do end up that way then remember, if a person approaching you looks like a dangerous escaped mental patient, that’s probably exactly what they are!
Anyway, hope that helps, and that you enjoy it. If you are determined to go native on the day and not seem like a tourist then be aware: You could be any race, size, age, physical appearance in the world and nobody will bat an eyelid, but an American accent will absolutely make you stand out like a sore thumb!
Let us know how you get on!
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