London Derbies Guide: Every Rivalry in the Capital
Eighteen clubs, one city — a London football derbies guide to every rivalry in the English capital, with travel between grounds and why kick-off times move.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Clubs & Rivalries19 min read
- Greater London boroughs
- 32 plus the City
- Oldest of the capital's league clubs
- Fulham, 1879
- Arsenal moved to north London
- 1913
- Rebuilt Wembley opened
- 2007
On a Saturday in the capital there are frequently more senior football matches within the M25 than in any other city in Europe. Not the biggest matches, necessarily. Just the most of them, stacked from the Premier League down through the EFL and the National League into the Isthmian and Southern Leagues, across thirty-two London boroughs and the City. The Football Association, whose national game is administered from Wembley, has never had to encourage football in London. The problem has always been fitting it in.
That density is what produces the derbies. Every one of the fixtures described below exists because two clubs were founded within a few miles of each other, by people who lived there, and neither has moved far enough since to make the argument go away.
Eighteen clubs, one city
Counting London's football clubs is harder than it looks, because the boundary keeps moving and because clubs die. Greater London as currently drawn dates from 1965, which puts places like Barnet, Bromley, Sutton and Dagenham inside the capital that were previously in Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey and Essex. Watford, four miles beyond the boundary, is not in London and its supporters will tell you so.
Taking Greater London as it now stands, and counting every club that has ever played in the Football League or Premier League from a ground inside it, the list runs to eighteen.
| Area | Clubs with Football League history |
|---|---|
| North | Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Barnet |
| East | West Ham United, Leyton Orient, Dagenham & Redbridge, Thames |
| West | Chelsea, Fulham, Queens Park Rangers, Brentford |
| South | Crystal Palace, Charlton Athletic, Millwall, Wimbledon, AFC Wimbledon, Sutton United, Bromley |
South London's total surprises people, largely because the sector's clubs are smaller and less televised. It contains two of the four London clubs founded before 1890, the capital's most recent additions to the Football League, and a fan-owned club that had to rebuild itself from the Combined Counties League after the original was moved to Milton Keynes.
North London's total of three is the smallest and the most misleading, because two of the three are among the largest clubs in England. Barnet, the third, played at Underhill in the borough of Barnet for over a century before moving to The Hive at Edgware in 2013 — still inside Greater London, still north.
North London and the 1919 grievance
Arsenal are a south-east London club by birth. They were formed in 1886 by workers at the Royal Arsenal armament factory at Woolwich, played as Royal Arsenal and then Woolwich Arsenal, and were the first southern club admitted to the Football League, in 1893. Their move north to Highbury in 1913 was a commercial decision by Henry Norris, taken because Woolwich was hard to reach and the crowds were not paying the wages.
Tottenham Hotspur had been in north London since 1882, formed by schoolboys from a local cricket club and named for Harry Hotspur, the Percy heir whose family held land in the area. Arsenal's arrival four miles down the road was, from the Tottenham side, a straightforward territorial invasion, and Spurs opposed it formally.
The permanent grievance came six years later. When league football resumed after the First World War, the First Division was expanded from twenty clubs to twenty-two. Tottenham had finished bottom of the pre-war First Division. Arsenal had finished fifth in the Second. Arsenal were elected to the enlarged top flight and Tottenham were not, and the vote has been argued about ever since. Norris's influence on that decision is the specific charge.
The modern fixture is played between the Emirates Stadium, opened in 2006, and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, opened in 2019 on the site of White Hart Lane. Both are among the largest club grounds in England, both are served by heavily managed transport operations, and the fixture is always policed as a high-risk match. The full history sits in our guide to the north London derby.
There is a third north London club with a claim to the phrase. Barnet's local rivalries — with Enfield, with Boreham Wood, with Hendon — belong to the non-league scene rather than to the EFL, and are covered further down this page.
West London, and four clubs inside a small triangle
Nowhere else in England packs four Football League clubs into an area this small. Stamford Bridge, Craven Cottage and Loftus Road sit within a few miles of one another, and the Brentford Community Stadium is a short run west along the river.
Chelsea's founding is the odd one. Stamford Bridge existed as an athletics ground from 1877, and when Gus Mears acquired it he offered it to Fulham, who already had Craven Cottage and turned it down. Rather than sell, Mears founded a club to play in it. Chelsea Football Club was created in 1905 with a stadium and no players, no history and no supporters, and was elected straight into the Second Division.
Fulham are the senior club in the capital by formation, founded in 1879 as a church side. Craven Cottage on the Thames retains the Cottage itself and the Stevenage Road stand designed by Archibald Leitch, which is listed and is one of very few Edwardian football structures in England still in use for its original purpose.
Queens Park Rangers took their name from the Queen's Park district of north-west London before settling in Shepherd's Bush, and their history of ground moves is the most restless in England — more than a dozen homes before Loftus Road. Brentford were founded in 1889 by members of a rowing club and spent 116 years at Griffin Park, a ground known throughout England for having a pub on each of its four corners, before moving to a new stadium beside Kew Bridge in 2020.
| Fixture | Grounds | Rough distance |
|---|---|---|
| Chelsea v Fulham | Stamford Bridge, Craven Cottage | Under two miles |
| Fulham v QPR | Craven Cottage, Loftus Road | About two miles |
| Chelsea v QPR | Stamford Bridge, Loftus Road | About two and a half miles |
| Brentford v QPR | Gtech Community Stadium, Loftus Road | About four miles |
Loftus Road deserves a note of its own. It holds around 18,000, which makes it one of the smallest top-flight grounds England has used in the modern era, and the pitch is hemmed in so tightly that the stands begin more or less at the touchline. QPR also hold a piece of English football's stranger history: they installed an artificial pitch in 1981, one of four Football League clubs to do so in that decade, and the plastic surfaces were eventually banned outright. The bounce at Loftus Road became a running argument in the English game for most of the 1980s.
Which of these counts as the west London derby depends entirely on who you ask, and the honest answer is that there is no agreed one. Chelsea supporters, whose club has spent almost its entire modern history in the top flight, tend to treat all three as minor. QPR and Fulham supporters do not. Brentford's rise into the Premier League in 2021 restored fixtures that had not been played in the top division within living memory for most of the people watching them.
East London, the Ironworks and the docks
West Ham United began in 1895 as Thames Ironworks FC, the works team of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company at Canning Town, set up by the yard's owner Arnold Hills. The club was wound up and reconstituted as West Ham United in 1900. The crossed rivetting hammers on the badge come directly from the yard, which is also where the nickname originates — a point often got wrong, since it has nothing to do with the "Ham" in West Ham. That and a hundred stranger derivations are set out in our guide to English football club nicknames.
Millwall have the mirror-image origin. Formed in 1885 by workers at J.T. Morton's canning factory on the Isle of Dogs, on the north bank, they were the Millwall of the Millwall docks. They crossed the river to New Cross in 1910 and have been a south London club for over a century — which makes West Ham against Millwall a derby between two clubs from the same industry and the same stretch of water, now on opposite banks.
It is the most consistently violent fixture in English football's post-war history, and both clubs know it. Meetings have produced serious disorder on multiple occasions, most notoriously around a cup tie at Upton Park in 2009, and the policing operation for any meeting is exceptional even by London standards. Because the two have spent much of the last thirty years in different divisions, it is also rare.
Leyton Orient are east London's third club and the oldest of them, tracing back to 1881 and playing as Clapton Orient for decades before moving to Brisbane Road. Their most significant chapter is not a football one: in 1915 a large number of the club's players enlisted together in the Footballers' Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, and several were killed at the Somme. Orient's rivalries are with West Ham, with Southend and with the non-league clubs of the surrounding boroughs.
Dagenham & Redbridge, formed in 1992 through the merger of Redbridge Forest and Dagenham, complete the sector. Their local fixtures against Barnet, Sutton and the Essex non-league clubs matter far more to their supporters than anything involving the Premier League.
South London and the cross-river fixtures
- 1879Fulham
- 1885Millwall
- 1886Arsenal
- 1895Thames Ironworks
Foundation years for four London clubs, taken from club histories. These are formation dates, not the dates each club joined the Football League.
The southern sector is the largest and the least understood from outside, partly because it has never had a club that dominated English football for long.
Crystal Palace were formed in 1905 at the Crystal Palace itself, the Paxton structure that had been relocated to Sydenham and whose grounds hosted every FA Cup final from 1895 until the First World War. The club moved to Selhurst Park in 1924, another Leitch design, and stayed. Their nickname changed with their identity: they were the Glaziers, for the glass, until Malcolm Allison rebranded them as the Eagles in the early 1970s and changed the strip to red and blue.
Charlton Athletic, also formed in 1905, play at The Valley, a ground dug into a chalk pit in south-east London and once one of the largest in the country. Charlton's defining episode is the exile — forced out of The Valley in 1985, the club spent seven years groundsharing, first at Selhurst Park and then at Upton Park. Supporters formed the Valley Party, which stood candidates in the 1990 Greenwich council elections purely to force the planning issue, and took a substantial share of the vote without winning a seat. The club returned to The Valley in 1992. It remains one of the very few cases in England where a supporters' movement won an argument of that size outright.
Millwall's move south created the Charlton and Palace fixtures, both of which are more hostile than a neutral would guess. AFC Wimbledon add a further layer. Founded by supporters in 2002 after an independent commission approved Wimbledon FC's relocation to Milton Keynes, the club climbed from the Combined Counties League to the Football League in 2011 and returned to a new ground at Plough Lane in 2020. Their fixtures against the club that replaced them are not a London derby at all, which is precisely the grievance.
Palace against Brighton is the other south London rivalry that gets everywhere, despite Brighton being fifty miles away on the south coast. It is covered separately in our guide to the M23 derby.
Derbies that vanished
Clubs move, merge and fold, and when they do the fixtures go with them.
Woolwich Arsenal's departure north in 1913 removed a senior club from south-east London entirely and killed off local fixtures against Charlton and the Kent sides that never returned. It is the single largest redrawing of the capital's football map.
Thames AFC lasted three seasons in the Football League, from 1930, playing at the West Ham Stadium in Custom House — a greyhound and speedway venue with an enormous capacity and almost no supporters. A Second Division fixture against Luton Town in December 1930 drew 469 people, which is generally cited as the lowest attendance for a Football League match. The club resigned in 1932. Its brief existence is the clearest evidence that London's football market has limits.
Wimbledon FC's relocation in 2004 removed a club that had gone from the Southern League to the First Division in nine years and won the FA Cup in 1988. Its derbies with Crystal Palace, with Millwall and with Chelsea simply ceased to exist as league fixtures.
Then there are the fixtures that have faded rather than died. Leyton Orient against Arsenal, Brentford against Fulham, Charlton against Tottenham — all were regular league meetings within the last century and all now depend on a cup draw or a promotion. A derby needs two clubs in the same division, which is why the capital's derby map redraws itself every few seasons.
Ground moves have done nearly as much damage as relegations. Highbury, Upton Park, White Hart Lane, Griffin Park and the old Wembley have all gone within living memory, and with them a set of fixtures that were partly defined by the buildings they were played in. An Arsenal-Tottenham match at Highbury, with its art deco East Stand and its 38,000 capacity, was a physically different event from the same fixture at a 60,000-seat bowl. Supporters who complain about atmosphere in the new grounds are usually describing this rather than anything about the football.
The FA Cup keeps some of the dead fixtures alive by accident. A third-round draw pairing a Premier League club with a London club four divisions below produces, for one afternoon, a derby that no longer exists in the league — and it produces it with a full away allocation and a crowd that has been waiting a generation for it.
Non-league London
Below the National League, the capital has a dense and long-established non-league scene, most of it in the Isthmian League. These fixtures are cheap, unsegregated, and in several cases considerably better attended than their level would suggest.
Dulwich Hamlet, at Champion Hill in East Dulwich, have become the best-known example — a club whose crowds outgrew its division, with a strong local identity and long-running rivalries against Tooting & Mitcham United and Carshalton Athletic. Wealdstone, in Harrow, hold one of the sharpest north-west London rivalries, against Hendon. Enfield Town were formed by supporters in 2001, in circumstances comparable to AFC Wimbledon's, and play in the borough of Enfield.
East and north-east London add Clapton, whose Old Spotted Dog Ground at Forest Gate is among the oldest senior football grounds in the country, and Haringey Borough at Coles Park. South of the river, Bromley, Sutton United and Welling United have all had spells in the National League, and their meetings with each other are proper local fixtures with a century of history behind some of them.
If you are visiting London and want to watch football on a weekend when the big grounds are sold out or the fixtures have been moved for television, this is the answer. A non-league London derby costs a fraction of a Premier League ticket, admits you at the turnstile without a membership scheme, and lets you stand. Our ground-hopping guide covers how to plan that properly.
Getting between grounds on a matchday
London's grounds are on eleven different rail and Underground corridors, and the useful thing to understand is that they are almost never on the same one. Moving from a north London ground to a south London ground on a matchday afternoon means crossing the centre at the worst possible time.
| Ground | Nearest station | Line |
|---|---|---|
| Emirates Stadium | Arsenal / Finsbury Park | Piccadilly, Victoria |
| Tottenham Hotspur Stadium | White Hart Lane / Seven Sisters | Overground, Victoria |
| Stamford Bridge | Fulham Broadway | District |
| Craven Cottage | Putney Bridge | District |
| Loftus Road | White City / Shepherd's Bush | Central |
| Gtech Community Stadium | Kew Bridge | Overground |
| London Stadium | Stratford | Jubilee, Central, Elizabeth |
| Brisbane Road | Leyton | Central |
| Selhurst Park | Selhurst / Norwood Junction | Southern |
| The Valley | Charlton | Southeastern |
| The Den | South Bermondsey | Southeastern |
| Plough Lane | Haydons Road | Thameslink |
Several stations operate under match-day restrictions. Holloway Road closes or runs exit-only around Arsenal fixtures because the lift capacity cannot handle a crowd. South Bermondsey has a segregated walkway that takes away supporters to The Den without passing through the surrounding streets. Wembley Park, for national fixtures and finals, runs a one-way system across Olympic Way that adds twenty minutes to the walk in each direction.
Contactless and Oyster work across the whole network, so no advance ticketing is needed, and daily capping means a day of ground-hopping across zones costs less than most visitors expect. For anyone coming into the capital from elsewhere in England, our guide to train travel to English football matches covers the intercity side.
Why London kick-off times move
Almost no London derby of any size kicks off at three o'clock on a Saturday, and there are two separate reasons that get confused with each other.
The first is policing. The Metropolitan Police assess fixtures for risk, and a high-risk London derby will routinely be moved to an early lunchtime slot to shorten the drinking window, or to a Sunday afternoon to reduce the number of competing operations in the city on the same day. Where several London clubs are at home on the same weekend, the police can and do object to a combination of fixtures, and one of them will move. This is a negotiation between the clubs, the leagues and the force rather than a rule in a book.
The second is broadcasting, and it interacts with a restriction unique to English football. No match may be televised live in the United Kingdom between 2.45pm and 5.15pm on a Saturday, which means the traditional Saturday afternoon slot is the one kick-off time broadcasters cannot use. Everything that moves for television moves out of that window rather than into it. The reasoning behind the restriction, and the argument about whether it still works, is set out in our explainer on the 3pm blackout.
For a visitor the practical consequence is simple. Do not book travel around an assumed three o'clock kick-off for any fixture involving two London clubs. Confirmed times for televised rounds are usually published several weeks ahead, and cup ties can move at under a fortnight's notice.
How support is actually distributed
The capital's football allegiances follow transport lines and family history more closely than they follow postcodes, and the pattern is genuinely different from a one-club city.
The broad shape is that Arsenal and Tottenham divide north London along a line that runs roughly through Harringay and Wood Green, with Arsenal stronger to the west and south and Tottenham stronger to the north and east into Enfield and Waltham Forest. West Ham's heartland runs east from Newham through Barking and Dagenham and out into Essex, and the club's move from Upton Park to Stratford in 2016 shifted its centre of gravity a few miles west without changing much else. Millwall draw from Bermondsey, Deptford, Lewisham and out into north Kent. Palace take south London from Croydon up through Norwood and Streatham, with Charlton holding the south-east and Bromley contested.
West London is the most fragmented. Chelsea's local support in Fulham, Chelsea and Hammersmith sits alongside a national and international following of a size no other London club except Arsenal matches, which makes ticket availability a different problem there than anywhere else.
Something similar applies to the two east London clubs, for a different reason. Stratford is a national transport interchange with the Elizabeth line, the Jubilee, the Central and mainline services out to Essex converging on it, which makes the London Stadium one of the easiest grounds in England to reach from outside the city. Brisbane Road, three miles away on the Central line, is not, and Leyton Orient's support has stayed almost entirely local as a result. Accessibility shapes a catchment as much as history does.
The southern boroughs show the opposite effect. Selhurst Park, The Valley, The Den and Plough Lane are all on suburban rail rather than the Underground, all four require a change at a mainline terminus for anybody coming from the north of the city, and all four consequently draw from an unusually tight radius. That is part of why south London football feels more parochial than the rest of the capital's, and why supporters in Bromley or Bexley are frequently in walking distance of nothing at all.
Two forces cut across all of this. Post-war slum clearance moved hundreds of thousands of Londoners out to the new towns and the outer boroughs while their allegiances stayed put, which is why so much of Essex supports West Ham and so much of Hertfordshire supports Tottenham. And television, from the 1990s onwards, decoupled support from geography entirely for a generation. A child in Croydon in 1975 supported Palace or Charlton. The same child today may well support Liverpool.
Planning a weekend of London football
- Fix the anchor matchChoose the one fixture you most want, and check whether it needs a membership or has already been moved for television.
- Check the sale mechanismPremier League clubs sell to members and season ticket holders first; EFL and non-league clubs are far easier and often sell on the day.
- Add a second tier fixturePair a Saturday Premier League match with a Sunday EFL or National League game in a different sector of the city.
- Fill the gaps with non-leagueIsthmian and Southern League fixtures on Saturday afternoons need no advance ticket and cost a fraction of the price.
- Plan the crossingsAllow an hour to move between a north London and a south London ground on a matchday, and check for planned engineering works.
- Book accommodation centrallyA central base beats a base near one ground, because no two London grounds are near each other.
A practical sequence, not a rule. Ticket availability and kick-off times are the two constraints that determine everything else.
A weekend built around one Premier League fixture and two smaller ones will show you more of the capital's football than a weekend built around two large clubs. The EFL and National League grounds — Brisbane Road, The Valley, The Den, Plough Lane, The Hive — are the ones where you can still walk up, pay, stand or sit where you like, and hear a crowd rather than a public address system.
Sunday is the most useful day. Television scheduling puts EFL fixtures on Sunday lunchtimes regularly, non-league sides play Saturday afternoons, and the combination lets you fit three matches into a weekend without any of them clashing.
The one thing that will wreck an itinerary is assuming ticket availability. A Premier League London derby is not something you can buy into on the Thursday before. The tier below is a different matter entirely, and it is where the capital's football is at its most enjoyable to a visitor: cheap, close, loud, and played between clubs whose supporters live in the streets outside the ground.
More English football guides sit on our England hub, and the wider section is at /sports/football.