This handsome village, nestled on the Pembrokeshire coast of West Wales, isn’t dead, exactly, more in a state of semi-hibernation. Nowhere is this more true than up a narrow hedgerow-lined road a short walk from the center. Here sit several stone cottages and bungalows, with names such as Sandalwood and Green Bank, their windows shut, their curtains drawn. Key safes, like limpet mines, cling to porch walls, while neatly assembled recycling bins stand undisturbed at the bottom of empty driveways.

All the telltale signs of holiday lets and second homes, before the summer surge. Some are for sale. Sure enough, it’ll be a different story come June, as Saundersfoot transforms into a bustling honeypot. Its shops, bars and restaurants will welcome these part-time residents with open arms, as a vital source of funds in a county short of cash. Yet even here in Pembrokeshire, long known as “Little England Beyond Wales”, these seasonal arrivals are resented too — their coming prompting fights over land and identity that could yet spark a political flashpoint.

All coasts and countryside, it’s easy to understand why anyone would want to own a home in Pembrokeshire. And, compared to British idylls such as Cornwall, it remains cheap. According to the latest data from the Office of National Statistics, the average price for a detached house here is £308,000; a similar-sized property in Falmouth or St Ives might set you back £100,000 more. No wonder Pembrokeshire has some 4,300 second homes. Only Gwynedd, home to Snowdonia, has more in Wales. In Saundersfoot and nearby Tenby, Pembrokeshire’s most popular tourist resort, one-in-four properties are reckoned to be second homes or holiday lets.

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But investors in getaway properties here are starting to question whether they really are welcome. Using discretionary powers allocated by the Welsh Labour government, Pembrokeshire County Council slapped a 200% council tax premium on second homes in 2024, effectively tripling their rate. Though the charge was subsequently lowered to 150%, and is due to fall even further this year, it has spooked second homeowners, who are now looking to sell up. That’s shadowed by changes elsewhere in Wales. In Gwynedd, for instance, the council proposed legislation that would require homeowners to apply for planning permission to convert residential properties into second homes — though it was later forced to backtrack after residents and businesses complained.

To be fair, the idea of a second home tax — mandating that owners of non-primary residences must contribute to the local economy beyond visiting their local fish shop in the summer — doesn’t appear wholly unreasonable. For hard-up Pembrokeshire County Council, whose latest budget revealed a funding gap of £27 million, that extra money could go some way to tackling real problems of housing and local services. “This isn’t an abstract policy debate,” says Josh Phillips, a Labour candidate for the Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire constituency in the looming Senedd elections, and who himself grew up in Solva, a picturesque Pembrokeshire fishing village with a high concentration of second homes. “It’s about whether people’s children will be able to live anywhere near where they grew up.”

Phillips, a former publican, understands the economic value second-homers bring. Yet he’s nonetheless tired of seeing the “hollowing out” of villages where houses lie empty for months at a time. Herein lies a crucial distinction between empty second homes on the one hand — and those with visible signs of occupancy on the other. Speak to people in Pembrokeshire and, without exception, they have no time for totally vacant properties, blaming them for everything from falling property prices to vandalism to vermin infestations. In January, the Pembrokeshire Council backed a last-ditch proposal that would force the sale of properties left empty for over a year back to the community.

From afar, the debate around Pembrokeshire’s second homes can seem framed in anti-English terms, given how many second homeowners come from across the border. Though plenty hail from Cardiff too, it’s an easy assumption to make. I speak to one English former second-homer outside Tenby who tells me his family ended up selling a few years ago, after being made to feel unwelcome in the village. As he puts it: “I don’t think it helped that we were from Kensington.”

That’s arguably echoed by a rise in nationalist activism, with second homes a predictable focus. Cymdeithas yr Iaith, a campaign group, claims Welsh speakers have effectively been priced out, turning their villages into “holiday parks”. It brings to mind a recent story about the coastal hamlet of Cwm-yr-Eglwys, which, reportedly overrun with second homes, had just one remaining Welsh speaker.

The truth, though, is that the origins of that moniker “Little England Beyond Wales” extend far beyond the modern age of tourism. The phrase first featured in a 16th-century text by the topographer and historian William Camden, who discovered a distinctly English-speaking culture upon his arrival in the region.

Camden was specifically referring to southern Pembrokeshire, whose Anglicization began with the Norman Conquest of the area in the 11th century, followed by the later arrival of Flemish settlers. Indigenous Welsh speakers were forced to move to the hilly country in the north, then kept in check by a boundary of castles built by the Normans and Flemish, known as the Landsker Line (deriving from the Norse for “divide”). This is why most place names in the south of the county, such as Saundersfoot, Haverfordwest and Milford Haven, are English sounding, a vivid contrast with the Maenclochogs, Crymychs and Trefdraeths further up the coast.

Hints of this history remain. Compared with neighboring Ceredigion, and Gwynedd to the north, Pembrokeshire is not a traditional voter base for Plaid Cymru. Nor is it synonymous with Labour like the former industrial valleys of South Wales, where “The Internationale” once rang out from miners’ welfare halls. Instead, the county swung between Labour and the Conservatives for decades before increasingly turning blue. The Tories prevailed in the last Westminster and Senedd elections here, buoyed substantially by the rural vote. (The county council, for its part, is made up of a hodge-podge of independents).

Now, though, rising frustrations with the national Conservative and Labour parties — and Westminster politics in general — are likely to impact the looming Sennedd election: potentially changing policy around second homes. Reform, which is standing candidates in Pembrokeshire, has pledged to increase Wales’ housing supply to tackle the issue. A party spokesperson tells me that it also intends to “take a wrecking ball to a number of anti-tourism measures” implemented by its rivals. Such is the frustration that even Plaid is in with a shot. After winning a council by-election seat in February, the party now also hopes to snatch a Pembrokeshire Senedd seat or two, its manifesto promising to “work with local authorities” on second homes.

Yet look past the politics of holiday homes — or even just politics generally — people here clearly have more humdrum worries too. In a back room of Pembroke Rugby Football Club, signed Wales shirts pride of place in a glistening glass cabinet, club chair Richard Jelley says the county’s biggest problem is a lack of jobs for young people, which has contributed to a brain drain. While the tourism industry is all well and good as a provider of seasonal employment, he says, it’s not enough to keep working-age people around, with many leaving to seek opportunities elsewhere, often in Cardiff or Bristol.

Jelley points to the closure of the Murco oil refinery in Milford Haven in 2014 as an inflection point for the county’s fortunes. The refinery had supported thousands of local jobs, which effectively went overnight. “We used to have two thriving senior sides here, but now we just have one,” says Jelley, a compact 60-something with a shock of fair hair. “That’s because the kids get to a certain age, there’s no work, and they move away.”

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This supports the argument that the proliferation of second homes and struggles of younger people might be more a case of correlation than causation. Wyn Harries, a school governor from Crymych, close to the Ceredigion border, makes a similar point, pinning the blame of depopulation of his rural part of the county firmly on “years of neglect” by a Welsh government stuck in the urban bubble of Cardiff Bay. “Their policy,” argues Harries, “is that people in the countryside shouldn’t be allowed to prosper,” adding that if there were decent rural jobs, the second-home issue would “resolve itself”.

In his 2019 book Wales: England’s Colony, the historian Martin Johnes argues that Wales’ identity has fundamentally been shaped by its relationship with its larger neighbor over the centuries, from its conquest in the 13th century by Edward I and subsequent annexation under Henry VIII, to parliamentary laws governing the use of the Welsh language in schools. This has led to a tendency, Johnes writes, to “blame England for everything that is wrong with Wales”.

Would it serve Wales better to turn the spotlight on itself instead? After all, devolution was meant to help the country steer its own path. Yet Cardiff Bay — or, more specifically, Welsh Labour, which has held a tight grip on the reins for the past 27 years — might well be accused of being as indifferent to the plight of the people in Pembrokeshire as their counterparts in London, contributing to the sense of alienation so clearly felt by locals. They’re frustrations sure to remain whoever triumphs in the Senedd next month, or whoever buys up the pretty cottage down the lane.

The match against Gillingham’s Hollands & Blair was not yet 10 minutes old, and didn’t seem destined to be a classic. But the Fisher faithful, whose side plays in the Southern Counties East Football League Premier Division — the ninth tier of the English pyramid — had not come to berate the players for the absence of overlapping wing play. They were there to support their club. Over the next 80 minutes, the team’s most vociferous supporters huddled together in the Dockers’ End, a small stand-cum-shelter behind the goal, its name a nod to the local area’s role in London’s once-booming shipping trade. As they watched, they belted out “When the Fish Go Swimming In”, their briny homespun chant.

Fisher ended up beating Hollands & Blair courtesy of a second-half penalty. But I got the sense the fans would have been just as happy, as they walked back up Brunel Road to the Overground, if they’d been hammered 5-0. Nor are they alone. From Mousehole AFC on the Cornish coast to Northumberland’s Blyth Spartans, gaggles of supporters brave summer sweat and winter snow, as well as some truly dreadful football, to cheer on their sides with a pint and a smile. Taken together, in fact, non-league football offers the perfect antidote to the petty tribalism and disenchantment of big-time fandom — and, perhaps, offers a path forward for society after the final whistle blows.

Non-league football is enjoying a moment. Average attendances in the National League South and the Isthmian Premier Division — levels six and seven of the pyramid, where most clubs are semi-professional — stood at 1,221 last season: up 134% from a decade earlier. Fisher, whose average crowds grew 13.9% in 2024-5, registered its highest ever attendance last November ,when 423 supporters filed through the stadium’s single turnstile to see the team take on Faversham Town. The depth of support in Britain’s football league pyramid is also impressive when compared against other similarly football-mad countries. In Spain, to give one example, the average attendance for the top team in the fourth tier of Spanish football is a mere 852.

The most obvious explanation for England’s non-league boom is the growing sense of fan disenfranchisement with elite football: namely the Premier League, where ticket prices continue to skyrocket. Manchester United’s announcement last season that it would increase match-day tickets for members from £40 to £60, and scrap concessions, as part of a cost-cutting exercise by its petrochemical magnate owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, was met with protests outside Old Trafford. Leeds faced the same backlash after introducing a 14% markup for its lowest-rate adult rates.

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The malaise also extends to the lower divisions. In the Championship, to give one example, Middlesbrough has faced criticism after increasing its top season ticket price to over £780. “What’s bred such disillusionment in the professional game is the ripping off of supporters,” Fisher’s secretary Jim Maycock tells me over a cup of tea, as we sit in the team’s empty clubhouse one weekday afternoon. “We’re trying to do the opposite. We just don’t see it as something we should be making money out of. We’re here for people to have somewhere to come and enjoy a game of football with their friends and family.” Fair enough: a Fisher’s season ticket will set you back a mere £100, with match-day admissions for adults capped at £8. Children under 16 get in free.

In truth, though, Fisher’s success rests on more than pounds and pennies. Football, after all, often sells itself on the romantic notion that it’s the game of the people: that the clubs would be nothing without their fans. And if that sentiment feels less-and-less relevant at the top, at Fisher it’s literally the case. Formed as a phoenix club out of the ruins of Fisher Athletic — a small team that bobbed about in the minnow leagues for several decades, before going bust in 2009 — it operates as a supporter-run cooperative. Members have a direct vote on who makes up the club’s board, which is responsible for everything from appointing the manager to picking the kit. In fact, Fisher is one of several fan-run clubs operating further down the footballing pyramid. Some were formed in protest at the unscrupulous dealings of their owners, such as FC United of Manchester, which appeared in 2005 following Manchester United’s takeover by the much-loathed Glazers. Others are minority supporter-owned, where fans collectively own a slice of the team’s shares through a fund or trust.

That sense of local ownership is a far cry from the creeping ugliness found elsewhere in the beautiful game: from the endless corporate sponsors to  the sight of children in kits emblazoned with the names of shady betting firms and state-owned Middle Eastern airlines. Then there are those soulless converted retail parks and parking lots that increasingly pass for modern stadiums. “The quality of elite football is probably higher than it was, say, 30 years ago,” says Neil Fredrik Jensen, a football analyst and author, “but the game has never felt less attractive because it’s so corporatized and polarized.” Fans, Jensen adds, are just “customers” now.

Spend an afternoon at Fisher’s and corporate sterility feels a long way off. In the clubhouse, a melange of regulars mingles with groundhoppers clutching matchday programs and pin badges for their collections. During my visit, the bar was doing a roaring trade in beer from a local brewery, and milky cups of tea. At half-time, a makeshift hospitality area was assembled for dignitaries from Hollands & Blair, who stood chatting around a small table piled high with coronation chicken sandwiches and Jammie Dodgers.

All the while, the steel and glass monoliths of Canary Wharf loomed large across the Thames, sparkling like polished diamonds in the sun. From Rotherhithe’s bend of the river, Britain’s financial heartland feels almost close enough to touch. Yet amid the no-frills surroundings of the Dockers’ End, it might as well have been an image beamed in from some distant universe. Beyond the bar-room banter, indeed, non-league football offers authenticity on the pitch as well. Unlike at the big stadiums, you can hear the thwack of the ball, and the crunching tackles, and the corner flags fluttering in the wind.

Free from the clutches of international television networks — which dictate that Premier League weekend games must take place either just after midday or late in the evening — the traditional 3pm kick-offs are also still upheld on Saturday afternoons. “That’s a huge thing that’s worked in our favor,” Maycock explains. “There’s none of these 8pm kick-offs where you end up getting home at midnight. Fans can come and watch us play knowing they can be back home for tea and Strictly or whatever.”

That sense of gentility — of integrating sport into the normal rhythms of life — is arguably also encouraged by the comparatively low stakes. The furious tribalism rife in higher levels of the English game, often not relevant to any real historical enmity between clubs, but a confection borne out of Sky Sports’ marketing departments, is rare at the non-league level. That conviviality makes it appealing to young families, much like women’s football has seen an influx of supporters grateful for an alternative to the toxicity that often accompanies male fixtures. “Non-league crowds have definitely changed,” says Jensen. “There was a time when they were almost entirely made up of men in their 50s with a passion for real ale and trains. Now, it’s much more about families.”

There are other reasons to watch too, for watching non-league football can sometimes be a portal to the bizarre. Where else would you find matches postponed as a result of sheep invasions and Canadian Geese droppings? Where else might an unsuspecting fan be prevailed upon to undertake linesman duties because the official went missing, as one Fisher fan was obliged to do a couple of seasons back?

Not that this amateurishness should take away from the sheer effort that goes into running the clubs and making the match days happen, often solely dependent on volunteers. When I meet Maycock, he had just spent the morning mending a fence and descaling the showers. “It can be hard work,” agrees Richard Davies, treasurer of Welsh semi-pro side Taff’s Well FC, and who also happens to be my brother. “And it’s not just match days. It’s marking out the pitches, cutting the grass, stocking the bar, washing kits. But we all chip because it’s for the good of the club. There are still those working-class values that you don’t see at the big clubs anymore.”

Of course, non-league football is not always a bastion of bliss. Jensen recently witnessed racist abuse while watching his beloved Hitchin Town. Concerns have also been raised over whether some of the jerry-built grounds, however charming they may seem, are truly fit for purpose. In September, one player died after colliding head-first with a concrete wall bordering the pitch at Wingate & Finchley.

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But such tragedies are rare. And besides, what non-league football ultimately offers, above all else, is that elusive sense of connection, whether with one’s fellow fans or indeed with the players themselves. Fisher’s players, Maycock tells me, can often be found in the clubhouse after home matches mingling with supporters over pizza. “Even the referee,” he adds, “will come in for a slice.” Instagram may have made Premier League players appear more accessible than ever, but your chances of sharing a Capricciosa with Erling Haaland remain slim.

Yet if non-league attendances are on the rise, Premier League fans continue to display an impressive following. For all the grousing over being exploited, the waiting lists for season tickets remain long. Despite the team’s ongoing problems on the pitch, the current queue for season tickets at Manchester United exceeds 120,000: with some fans set to wait 25 years for their slot. Average shirt prices across the league’s 20 teams last season crept up to £73, meanwhile, but that proved no deterrent to merchandise-hungry fans, with Liverpool generating $1.8 billion in kit sales alone.

We are unlikely, then, to see minnows like Fisher entirely supplant the bigger clubs in fans’ affections. Maycock still holds a candle for Brentford from his native West London. My brother’s first love remains Cardiff City. And while Wrexham’s ascendancy from non-league obscurity to the Championship, under the celebrity ownership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, may have captured imaginations and gained it an international fanbase, it’s worth remembering that the North Wales club has an established history dating back to the 1860s. Its stadium, the Racecourse Ground, is among the oldest on Earth. Wrexham’s status as a “sleeping giant” therefore made it ripe for a renaissance of the sort that most non-league teams could only dream of. Not that the minnows really care: they’re just happy to exist, sustained by peak attendances and the hope, some day, of a televised run in the early rounds of the FA Cup.

All this is also a reminder of Terry Eagleton’s tart assessment of football as the “crack cocaine” of the masses, which he speculated was part of a capitalist plot to suppress appetite for political change. That bread-and-circuses theory might raise some eyebrows, but the fact remains that the sport holds enormous sway over people in Britain in a way other pastimes don’t. When cricket moved from terrestrial television to Sky in 2006, it lost its place in the national conversation overnight, as armchair fans weren’t ultimately prepared to pay.

You could never imagine that happening with football, even for tiny teams like Fisher FC. My most recent visit was for a cup game against Bridon Ropes from Greenwich. It was an early September evening, Canary Wharf now twinkling bright against the dusk. As Fisher eased to a 4-0 win, I noticed a bear of a man in a tracksuit, cooing at a baby and with a side-eye on the game. It was Fisher’s manager Ajay Ashanike. He briefly paused to bark some instructions into a mobile phone to his assistant in the dugout across the pitch — “tell them not to get complacent and take pride in a clean sheet, yeah?” — before returning to the more pressing duty of peekaboo.

Tucked away next to a used-car dealership, on an industrial estate a few miles from Cardiff, the whole club is like this, an echo of a lost Britain. Deep within its cave-like chamber, the players resemble wraiths, forever trapped beneath the golden pools of light that illuminate each table. When I visit, Roxette’s 1987 song “It Must Have Been Love” hums from a TV overhead, perennially tuned to a channel showcasing big-haired hitmakers. The club seems to trade in yesterday’s prices too. I seize the offer of becoming a “lifetime” member for a mere £5, only to be informed that the club has run out of membership cards. Is this how it works at Soho House?

Not that I’d have it any other way. With its odd atmosphere, at once inviting and moody, Penarth Road is the kind of place I’ve been seeking out since I first stepped foot in a snooker hall some 25 years ago. Yet if it feels strange in its oldness, Penarth Road is unusual in other ways too. Over the last few decades, hundreds of clubs have closed right across the country. Cardiff alone has seen the shuttering of several over recent decades, each departure snuffing out a universe of cheap pints and the baize.

It speaks, if nothing else, to the deep questions floating around snooker’s future. How can the game flourish, in this country anyway, if there are fewer places to practice and play? Why would youngsters even want to master this maddening old game, seemingly stuck in the past and played by middle-aged men? And yet, in the Far East, potting balls is increasingly seen as young and cool. It all suggests a sport at the precipice of change, as this quintessential parlour game forsakes its English roots — and globalizes alongside everything else.

On the face of it, snooker is in good shape. Over recent years, the professional tour has seen an increase in tournaments and prize money. Ticket sales are strong: the World Championships and Masters are often sell-outs, with punters eagerly handing upwards of £50 to enjoy the privilege of watching a ludicrously difficult game made to look easy.

Snooker’s global audience has also skyrocketed. That is partly down to growing interest in Europe, following the victory of Belgium’s Luca Brecel in the 2022 World Championships. China, too, is increasingly attracted to the game, with the People’s Republic hosting as many as 60 million active players. The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), the game’s governing body, reckons the World Snooker Championship, set to start in Sheffield tomorrow, could attract a global televised audience of 500 million people.

This hardly suggests a sport on its knees, as snooker truly was some years back, when the end of tobacco sponsorship saw the number of ranking tournaments dwindle to just six. Some consider the intervention of Barry Hearn, with the promoter taking control of the tour in 2010, as the moment snooker was coaxed back from the abyss. “Snooker is no longer a UK-based sport,” says Jason Ferguson, the WPBSA chairman. “It’s a truly global sport.”

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It’s perhaps unfair to gauge snooker’s success through this country alone. But for all the talk of the game’s global standing, the only other places outside the UK to host professional tournaments this season have been China, Hong Kong, Germany and Saudi Arabia. In other words, then, the sport seems popular merely in pockets, rather than being a genuinely international phenomenon.

At one point during our chat, Ferguson, himself an ex-professional, tellingly refers to snooker as a UK “export”. “There’s something still quintessentially English about the game,” he says, “be that the dress code or its history.”

It’s a reasonable point. From the bow ties and waistcoats to the emphasis on sportsmanship — players are obliged to admit to fouls even if the referee doesn’t notice — snooker still brands itself on its British roots. But what if those roots are withering? According to one estimate, Britain hosted around 650 clubs in 2019. That pales compared to the thousands that sprung up in the Eighties, when it wasn’t unusual to find three or four in any mid-sized town. Much like pubs, many went out of business after the smoking ban arrived in 2007, while others were gobbled up by developers eager for slabs of prime real estate.

Ferguson says the rate of closures has since stabilized, while implying that the market may have been oversaturated anyway. Perhaps. But beyond the raw numbers, another way of understanding British snooker’s health is by going to places like Penarth Road — and here, the prognosis feels grim.

The punters when I visit are mostly men, with few appearing under 40. One, sporting a large gray beard and wearing an old Cardiff City top, swears as an attempt at a long red misses the pocket by a proverbial country mile. He looks admonishingly at his cue and grouses to his playing partner. “I might as well be playing with a bloody boomerang,” he laments, his South Welsh drawl hanging thick about my ears.

It didn’t used to be like this. Back in the Eighties, snooker was part of the national conversation. Its cast of colorful personalities — from hellraisers like White to housewives’ favorite Cliff “The Grinder” Thorburn — were chat-show regulars. On Fleet Street, each national paper had its own in-house snooker correspondent. A miniature snooker table was the Christmas present to have for any self-respecting child. As Chas ‘n’ Dave sang it in 1986, we were all “snooker loopy”.

While it’s true that snooker’s boom period was helped by there being only four television channels, meaning most households had little choice but to watch, it arguably tapped into the era’s political zeitgeist. As Dominic Sandbrook notes in his history of Eighties Britain, this individual sport, played by working class men dressed as gentlemen, chimed with the aspirationalist promise of Thatcherism.

How, then, to explain snooker’s apparent decline since those heady days? One answer, surely, is that there are now far more distractions. Its slow and gentle rhythm puts it instantly at odds with the mores of modern society. While fans savor the ebbs and flows of the World Championship final, the idea of a sporting contest taking two days feels increasingly ridiculous.

Then there are the multiple demands of being an aspiring professional in today’s game. The long hours of practice. The costs of traveling up and down the motorway to qualifying events. The cheap hotels. The solitude. Ben Harrison, a talented former English amateur champion, abandoned the sport in 2016 because of the strain. “It just all became too much in the end,” he tells me. Harrison now leads a much happier life as a married man and estate agent in his hometown of Trowbridge. “I have no regrets.”

But snooker’s authorities are not giving up bringing young people into the game. This includes projecting a healthier image of clubs, moving away from their erstwhile reputation as smoke-filled dens of iniquity, frequented by truants, gamblers and chancers.

Yet if it’s true that many of these new venues offer better facilities, others feel more like sports bars than snooker clubs, rigged out with bright lights and big screens, where American pool tables outnumber their larger, green-baized counterparts. They don’t immediately lend themselves to the atmosphere required to play a game so demanding in concentration that Australian wit Clive James once described it as “chess with balls”.

Not that everywhere seems to take snooker so casually. For if Penarth Road Snooker Club symbolizes the game’s past, and those shiny bar-and-grill joints seem only tangentially interested in the sport, then Victoria’s Snooker Academy in Sheffield might offer a glimpse into its future.

Located in a converted modern office space, on a quiet street next to the city center — not far from the Crucible, hallowed home of the World Championships — you could easily miss the place but for an A4-sized notice Blu-Tacked to the door: “KNOCK HERE FOR SNOOKER”.

The club is silent, save for the drone of an air-conditioning unit and the purr of a fridge stocked with tubs of Asian ice cream. The wall above the door is emblazoned with a flurry of motivational buzzwords: “Creativity”; “Ambition”; “Belief”. The players, for their part, wear earbuds as they go about various practice drills in metronomic fashion on the professional-grade Star tables, as pristine as country lawns. It’s all a long way from Penarth Road: some of the tables at my old club don’t seem to have been reclothed since before Welsh devolution.

While technically open to the public, anyway, the Academy is very much a place of work. Andrew Bromley, who runs the club with his Chinese wife Victoria Shi, doesn’t seem overly bothered when I mention it’s listed as “permanently closed” on Google. “We don’t really want people coming in off the street with cans of lager and disturbing our players,” he whispers as he shows me around. “This is a professional environment.”

Fair enough: several members of the Academy’s stable have made it to ranking event finals over the past few seasons. That includes the 22-year-old Si Juahui, and the 21-year-old Wu Yize, even as Zhao Xintong captured 2022’s UK Championship at the tender age of 25.

As the names imply, Victoria has become a haven for Chinese players especially, talented young professionals who’ve come to chase their dreams. They’re far from alone — for if snooker has become popular viewing in Beijing and Chengdu, Shanghai alone may have some 1,500 clubs.

China’s fascination with snooker can be traced back to the Eighties, when Barry Hearn organized exhibition tours in Hong Kong, then still a British territory, with the hope of growing the game in Asia. But it wasn’t until an 18-year-old Ding Junhui captured the China Open in 2005 that snooker truly took off on the mainland. Ding’s success turned him into a national hero overnight, and thrust the sport into the public consciousness. Ever the shrewd businessman, Hearn’s first act upon his 2010 return to the sport was to increase the number of tournaments in China.

While there is no evidence of strategic investment in snooker on the part of China’s government, local officials have set up snooker academies. The game is also on the sporting curriculum in schools. There are even so-called snooker colleges, such as International Billiards Academy in Yushan, in which students are taught the art of the baize alongside vocational subjects.

Little wonder, then, that former world champion Stephen Hendry recently predicted that up to eight of the game’s Top 16 players, considered snooker’s elite, may hail from China in the next decade. That’s even as the People’s Republic new stars are feted as heroes in their homelands, with Bromley describing how Academy alumni “can’t walk down the street” without being recognized.

It’s again hard not to make the international comparison. Apart from Ronnie O’Sullivan — arguably the most gifted player ever to pick up a cue, and charismatic enough to have been profiled in the New Yorker — it’s tough to think of any British snooker player the public could spot in a lineup.

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But O’Sullivan, who turns 50 this year, can’t go on forever. Neither can his longtime peers Mark Williams and John Higgins — collectively known as the “Class of ’92” after the year they turned professional. At 35, world number one Judd Trump is still the closest this country has to a cue-toting wunderkind, while the reigning world champion Kyren Wilson is 33.

“Snooker could definitely do with a Luke Littler moment,” says Nick Metcalfe, host of the Talking Snooker podcast, alluding to the impact the teenager has had on darts since winning the world title earlier this year. “While we appreciate the magic of the older guys, seeing them in the big finals time after time is not necessarily a great sign.”

Neither, perhaps, is snooker’s tendency to revere its past. That nostalgia is sure to be on display with the imminent 40th anniversary of the 1985 “black ball final” — when 18.5 million TV viewers stayed up past midnight to watch a bespectacled Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis to become champion of the world.

Taylor and Davis have recreated the famous match countless times over the years in exhibitions, featuring novelty wigs, oversized glasses and exaggerated finger wags. For Ferguson, “it’s a key milestone in the sport that we’ve got to milk.” But others believe the reminiscing has been done to death.

“I think this constant harking back to the Eighties is a real problem,” says Lewis Pirnie, a snooker analyst and frequent visitor to events in China. “The game has moved on and we should be championing the younger players. We have multiple event winners from China and there are still commentators who can’t pronounce their names correctly.”

Pirnie is obviously right. Every sport needs to regenerate if it wants to thrive. You might even say the state of snooker in Britain serves as a microcosm for the country at large: stuck in an endless Thatcherite hangover and in urgent need of renewal. All the while, a conveyor belt of talented young players continues to whir away in China, as the country enters an exciting new chapter.

Yet amid these bewildering geopolitical shifts, and a world where we want things faster and louder, snooker’s immutability remains part of the charm. You can tune into a tournament safe in the knowledge that the same old faces will be there — the same stalwarts as when TV had four channels and Neil Kinnock vied to be prime minister.

Visiting the Penarth Road Snooker Club is to be enveloped by the same kind of nostalgia. Who needs the world outside, with its natural light and unspeakable problems, when within the perpetual gloam there awaits the promise of cut-price lager and a black ball finish?

As I go to pay up, I’m drawn once more to that old photo of the Whirlwind, shrine-like behind the bar. “He was a real character, wasn’t he?” says one punter returning a tray of balls in an enormous splayed hand to the counter. “But then there were lots of them around back in those days.” As I step back out into the starry Welsh night, I can still hear the gentle click of balls as another synth classic strikes up.

“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 neighbor 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 center, 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.

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 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 centers 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.