Cray Wanderers

Cray Wanderers spent the 2024/25 season adjusting to a ground of their own for the first time in more than a century and a half of existence — Flamingo Park, in Chislehurst, replacing a long-running arrangement in which they had to borrow someone else's pitch to play at home. The same season brought back a fixture nobody currently at the club had ever seen: a competitive match against Cray Valley Paper Mills, the "Cray Derby", renewed after more than a hundred years apart.

The club traces itself to 1860, when migrant labourers building the Cray Valley railway viaduct around St Mary Cray and St Paul's Cray put a team together. That start puts them among the oldest football clubs anywhere and the oldest in London.

Trophies have mostly come at Kent League and local-league level down the decades, but the clearest sign of recent progress was winning the Isthmian League Division One South-East in 2018–19. A handful of players have gone on to bigger clubs from Cray Wanderers sides — John Faulkner played for the Wands in the 1960s before moving on to Leeds United and Luton Town, and Dennis Burnett later turned out for West Ham United and Millwall.

Before Flamingo Park, "The Wands" moved through grounds the way a club without land of its own has to: Star Lane, then Fordcroft until it was sold in 1936, later Grassmeade, then Oxford Road in Sidcup, and finally more than two decades sharing Hayes Lane with Bromley because Oxford Road had no floodlights. Flamingo Park holds 2,500, with 299 seats, 250 of them under cover — the first home in Chislehurst the club has actually owned.