Sport & Fitness

Start a debate about London’s most iconic sporting venues and you could spend hours arguing the merits of Lord’s, Wimbledon, Twickenham and York Hall, while glancing back in time to Wembley, White City, Highbury or Harringay.

One that might easily be overlooked is Walthamstow Stadium, yet an event on Saturday night helps to explain the status of this east London dog track within sport and wider popular culture – as famously acknowledged by the likes of Blur, British Airways, Renault and Guy Ritchie. Feature continues

The Stow opened in 1933, seven years after the first dog race in Britain heralded an explosion of interest, with annual attendances shooting towards the 50 million mark. It was built by William Chandler, who began as an illegal street bookie with runners standing on East End street corners. Chandler went legit at horse-racing tracks, becoming a bookmaker to the members’ enclosures in very good company: standing on the rails next to him were William Hill, Jo Coral and Max Parker, founder of Ladbrokes. Then, always with his eye to the main chance, Chandler acquired a rubbish dump on Chingford Road and created the art deco facade which remains the most distinctive feature of a stadium once dubbed ‘Las Vegas at the end of the Victoria Line’.

Chandler died in 1947, a year after his son Victor had taken control of the betting business, while the stadium passed to Charles, another of William’s eight children. It was later handed down to Charles’s brother Percy, who was managing director until 1984, when his nephew Jack succeeded with another Charles becoming chairman. Incredibly, all of the eight current directors are family members, continuing an unbroken line that is rare in any company. What’s more, Frances Chandler, the first Charles’s wife, has been a successful greyhound owner since the 1950s.

Victor’s son then created a chain of betting shops, and 25 years ago passed on the company to his own son – named, you’ve guessed it, Victor. He’s the man who, in 1999, took the business offshore to Gibraltar and hastened the introduction of tax-free betting in the UK when the government, seeing others follow suit, abolished the ten per cent duty in a bid to tempt them back.