In August 2008 the lights finally went out at Walthamstow. Falling profits and attendances forced the stadium's owners, Charles Chandler, whose family had owned the course since it opened in 1933 to sell the land to developers.
In 1984 a nightclub called Charlie Chan's was opened within the foundations of the clocktower. It closed permanently in November 2007. It could be said that if a person from the East End of London refers to "going down the dogs", they were probably going to the dog track at Walthamstow or Romford Greyhound Stadium.
There were 33 greyhound tracks in London, but now only Romford, Crayford and Wimbledon survive. In the final race was held, Meeting 152 on Saturday 16 August 2008 at 23:00, the winner was No. 2 'Mountjoy Diamond'. Alas numerous attempts to buy or lease the stadium back from the current owners have failed.
We were well aware of a dog being inside the stadium from previous reports we had read from a few years back and went armed with Nelly’s counter dog devices, a fantastically ingenious pair of devices, which although crudely fashioned would have been suitably successful had their deployment been deemed a necessity.
The only two questions that ran through my mind were:
How in the names of all things holy would Nelly deploy the device while running from a dog to start with it was knotted at the top? (We had failed to prime the releases before starting the explore)
What self respecting guard dog would stop for a light bite when it could quite happily chew on Nelly’s love tackle? (I chose Nelly as the most likely to be mauled as I figured at a push, or even with a push, I could beat him in a foot race
)We had a good two hour explore saw security, played cat a mouse with them for an hour while seeing all we could before beating a sensible retreat to move on to another quarry.
Walthamstow Leprechaun
And finally a couple of Pano's:
