Alma Swanley FC

Alma Swanley 0 Beckenham Town 0 - Kent League

Swanley is a town and civil parish in the Sevenoaks District of Kent, but is under the postal zone of the London Borough of Bromley. It is located on the Greater London/Kent border within the M25. In 1066, Swanley only consisted of a few cattle farms, surrounded in oak, sycamore and ash woodland. Because Swanley only consisted of a few homesteads, it was not mentioned in the Doomsday Book. There is a theory that the place name Swanley developed from the Saxon term 'Swine-ley', "Ley" meaning a clearing in the woods and "swine" meaning pigs. So it has been suggested that it was originally a Saxon pig farm. 

Based in Swanley, Alma Swanley FC was a founder member of the London Spartan League in 1975 and joined the Kent League in 1982. They won the title in 1986 but resigned from the league in 1994 and folded. The club competed in the FA Cup six times, with the best performance coming in their final season in the competition, 1992–93, when they lost in the second qualifying round to Yeading. In the FA Vase, their longest run was to the Quarter Finals in 1980–81, where it took Windsor & Eton to beat them in a replay.

My visit to Greencourt Road involved catching a train from central London to Swanley station. From there it was no more than a 5 minute walk to the ground. A drab end of season encounter on a pleasant sunny evening brought the curtain down on my groundhopping for the 1990-91 season.