Why Bishops Park is football's most iconic pre-match walk

We continue our series featuring elements that shape the Fulham FC matchday experience.

The biggest gripe against modern football stadiums, aside from the fact they all look like soulless bowls, is their location.

Often built on large swathes of industrial land, set apart from the towns and cities the clubs are based in, they offer little in terms of culture or character. And it’s often worse in the areas surrounding them.

There’s not a Fulham fan on the face of the planet who’s not grateful every day to call Craven Cottage home. We’d happily forego a 50,000-capacity stadium and everything that goes with it to remain there.

Bishops Park is a huge part of the Cottage’s appeal.

It’s widely regarded as the most picturesque and iconic walk to a football ground in England (Nottingham get in the mud).

But it wasn’t always that way.

It was donated to the public by the Bishop of London 143 years ago, when Fulham FC was just four years old. It was initially just Bishops Meadow (the strip of land along the river just after you enter from Putney Bridge), a marshy, polluted wasteland next to an even more unsanitary River Thames, with the Fulham Palace to the other side. After a decade - and a lot of work - the park officially opened to the public in 1893.

By the turn of the 20th century, much of Bishops Park as we know it today was open. The most popular element was (no surprises here) the man-made beach surrounding the ornamental lakes in Fielders Meadow, just after Bishops Meadow, originally known as Margate Sands, because the sands were brought in from - you guessed it - Margate.

After its 2010 rennovations, Fulham Beach, as it’s now known, remains a firm favourite among locals in the warm weather, while us match-going fans march past it at pace, regretting staying at the pub for that last pre-match beer.

Bishops Park also includes spaces for tennis and that classic English pastime, bowls, and there are allotments tucked behind Fulham Palace. If you’re a film buff, you can also go and see where scenes from The Omen were filmed. So there’s something for everyone, even if you’re not going to watch the mighty Whites.

But it’s that walk through Bishops Meadow, across the skate park with the cafe on your right, then alongside Fielders Meadow as your make your way to Craven Cottage, that makes Bishops Park so special.

I remember half-jogging behind my dad in the sun, rain and snow, desperate to make kick-off (we’d already walked from Lytton Grove, just off Putney Hill!). There weren’t many other people walking though the park when I started going in 1995, but that number sure grew in the intervening six years as we rocketed up the leagues.

I remember walking back through the park, listening to my dad’s portable radio as James Alexander Gordon read out the full-time scores. People would walk alongside us and ask “how [insert team] got on”.

I’ve now made the walk with my eldest, and I’ll do it one day with my youngest. Then they’ll do the same with their kids in the future (hopefully I’ll be dawdling behind).

We’re extremely lucky to have had this journey to our cathedral of football.

Craven Cottage is special - but it’s the elements that surround it, like Bishops Park that contribute to its soul.

Long may they do so.