Boxing fights on in Bethnal Green
As Storm Darragh continued its rampage outside, unleashing an eddy of beer cans and fried chicken boxes down Cambridge Heath Road, York Hall was starting to fill up. On the top step of the brass-railed balcony, a father and son playfully sparred with each other, watched on by a group of women in matching Christmas jumpers. “You should be in the ring!” cackled one, sporting a headband topped by a pair of glittery reindeer antlers. The father ruffled the boy’s hair. Below, the second fight of the night was well underway. There they were: Ed “The Hammer” Chattey and Jordan “The Brown Eagle” Grannum, circling each other in the ring below, sheens of sweat glistening on their shoulders, the lighting gantry shining down.
“Let’s have him, Ed,” shouted the father, taking his place on one of the chipped, fold-down wooden seats next to me. Like him, the crowd seemed to back Chattey, a spry super middleweight from Ealing with only two fights and one win to his name. Tonight would not be his second. Not far into the third round, Grannum sprung a surprise left hook that cracked the younger man’s cheek. He sank to one knee, as the crowd let out something between a gasp and a groan. By the time Grannum had been declared the winner, 10 minutes later on points, my neighbour had already headed to the bar, his lad in tow behind.
Come to York Hall most weekends and you’ll witness the same, thick-scarred brawlers, punching, ducking and weaving at what The Times once called a “faded palace of the pugilist”. That, in itself, is surprising. Compared to Wembley or Wimbledon, this is a strange sporting icon, with its rickety chairs and scratched chocolate floorboards, especially when similar London institutions have stumbled and died. But then again, York Hall is different from Smithfield and Billingsgate and countless of empty East End pubs. Unlike them, it’s a place that has retained a certain vitality and energy — qualities associated with boxing itself — that has enabled it to keep the developers at bay and continue to welcome new Londoners eager for the ring. More than that, though, this scruffy spot surely offers something else: cocksure authenticity in a town, and a sport, that can sometimes feel so cold.
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For a place commonly touted as the “home” of British boxing, York Hall gives off an unassuming air from outside. Bordered to the side by a community arts space, and in front by public gardens that surround the nearby Young V&A museum, its handsome neo-Georgian exterior gives little indication of the blood, sweat and tears that have been spilled here since it first welcomed professional boxers in the late Forties. That’s hardly surprising: built in 1929, York Hall actually started life as a public baths, serving the many Eastern European Jews who then called Bethnal Green home. It’s a dual identity that’s endured ever since. During the week, it functions as a leisure centre, while also hosting business conferences, trade shows and weddings.
But on Saturday, York Hall’s main hall turns into a kind of lion’s den, where up-and-coming practitioners of the “sweet science” put their mettle to the test, amid an echoing cacophony of screams and shouts from a baying crowd. In this corner of East London, boxing runs deep, right back to Daniel Mendoza, a Sephardic Jew who went from working in a tobacco shop to becoming one of the most feted prizefighters of the 18th century. Despite the era’s ingrained antisemitism, one fight was watched by the future King George IV, while the fighter himself used his winnings to found a boxing academy.
Jeff Jones, a local historian, details other tales of local boys made good. Like Mendoza, who basked in his nickname of “The Star of Israel”, many East End heroes have enjoyed deliciously evocative labels. Scour the annals of the early 20th century and you’ll find names like Kid Froggy and “Bombardier” Billy Wells. In the Twenties came another Jewish fighter, Ted “Kid” Lewis, who was in 2014 named by ESPN as one of the 50 greatest boxers of all time.
There aren’t many tobacco shops in Bethnal Green these days — but otherwise little has changed, certainly compared to other establishments swept away by East End gentrification. One way of understanding this, surely, is to appreciate that York Hall changed with the times, or anyway that it hosts a sport that bonds beyond language. For just as Jones has described boxing as a “way out” of East End poverty for generations of young Jews and Irishmen, York Hall welcomes more recent arrivals too.
“York Hall hosts a sport that bonds beyond language.”
Consider Yaser “Yasiiboy” Al-Ghena, winner of the final fight the night I visited. Born in Syria, but raised in Finchley, Al-Ghena cited his old boxing gym as playing a pivotal role in helping him turn his life around after falling in with a bad crowd. “Getting kids off the streets is integral to what we do,” Tony Burns, the legendary trainer at Repton Boxing Club, explained before his death in 2021. “This is somewhere they can come and they’re not getting into trouble. They are actually enhancing themselves, learning self-control as well as learning to box, and that’s bringing the right stuff out of them.”
And where Al-Ghena crowned his victory by becoming the English super-lightweight champion, York Hall has hosted more famous names too. Plenty of young fighters here — Anthony Joshua, Ricky Hatton, Carl Froch — have gone on to become world champions. In truth, though, I think York Hall endures less as a starmaker: and more because it refuses to abandon sluggers like Chattey and Grannum. This, after all, is not Caesar’s Palace or Madison Square Garden, or any other distant pay-per-view fortress. Rather, it’s a small hall boxing venue with a capacity of just 1,200. It’s precisely this lack of size that provides York Hall with its unique atmosphere, where it’s not uncommon for boxers to rub shoulders with punters. I once saw Robbie “The Camden Caretaker” Chapman, a handsome light-heavyweight with blonde dreadlocks, entertaining the rabble by the bar after a points loss. The self-professed “best looking journeyman in boxing” was still in shorts as he talked, a towel loosely draped over his shoulder, his defeat already in the past.
York Hall, in short, is an extension of the sweat, spit and sawdust of the boxing gym, lending it an intoxicatingly genuine air. Contrast this with November’s farce at the AT&T arena in Texas, when social media menace Jake Paul duked it out with a 58-year-old Mike Tyson in a Netflix special as depressing as it was gaudy. If that was boxing at its most manufactured, then York Hall, for all its peeling paint, represents the sport at its purest. In an age where professional sport has been increasingly commodified, these grass roots must surely count for something.
Spend time watching the crowds at York Hall, and you’ll encounter everyone from a young family on a night out to old boys reminiscing about some once-bright prospect. The boxers that attract the most raucous support have traditionally come from East or Greater London. When I first went to York Hall, in the early 2000s, any bout involving Romford’s Kevin Mitchell, a skilled if slightly ill-disciplined featherweight, could be guaranteed to blow the roof off. On my latest visit, though, it was Lauren Parker, a former European female super-flyweight champion from Stevenage, who generated some of the loudest noise. Willed on by a large group of fans, they unfurled a large banner bearing her “Lionheart” nickname over the balustrade.
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The shabbiness of York Hall prompts enthusiasm in other ways. Fighters often bring armies of friends and family with them: from financial necessity as much as anything else. According to Steve Goodwin, a promoter whose company puts on the majority of shows at York Hall, most boxers need to sell around 60 tickets each to help cover the £20,000 required to stage a fight night, accounting for production, ambulances, medical teams and security. It is often a point of contention for the fighters, who question why, as professional sportspeople, they must effectively pay to play.
And if the boxers at York Hall are skint, the venue itself has problems too. It came close to closure in 2004, after the local council deemed it “out of date”. Two decades on, the British Boxing Board of Control, which oversees fights nationwide, still considers it unfit for purpose. Fighters and promoters alike have conceded that the changing rooms need gutting.
Local campaigns have saved York Hall for now. But even if the lockers are fixed and the flooring replaced, the future remains unclear. Can a place as tumbledown as this survive the regeneration of East London? To be sure, its grotty bar, sticky underfoot through endless spilled pints, feels light years away from the Bethnal Green Tavern, a five-minute walk away, where before the Chattey fight I eavesdropped on an earnest conversation about dadaism in the music of Brian Eno. Then again, even this paragon of traditional London has had to change with the times. A night at the boxing no longer comes cheap, with a ringside side seat costing just shy of £70, some £20 dearer than when I first visited. This doesn’t appear to have deterred punters, but that could change amid cost-of-living fears.
Yet through it all, like a plucky fighter who’s done the hard yards in the gym to make up for a shortfall in talent, York Hall is much greater than the sum of its parts. If nothing else, it has that splendid Twenties setting to fall back on, with promoters often finding that the cheapness of provincial leisure centres doesn’t make up for the magic of Bethnal Green. I felt that magic once more that cold night in December, when the fights were done, and the doors to Cambridge Heath Road were flung open once more. Storm Darragh was still in high dudgeon, but up ahead I spotted the father and son from earlier in the night. They were still sparring, as if the squall was merely a breeze.
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