Reddit Comment on the Crowds for Arsenal Parade ↳
As a Tottenham fan who lives almost a mile up Hornsey Road from Seven Sisters Road, I mostly stayed home. You could hear the noise and the media helicopters.
But I did pop out and, before it all happened, purposely went to the shops nearer the route. I saw the crowd then, and again just after 3pm, when they started streaming past on the way home in a more concentrated way.
It was really striking. Never seen a crowd like it - mutli everything, multi-generation, multi-religious, every shade, the whole breadth of an inner London borough, plus what seemed to be very many from the wealthier outer suburbs and counties - like clusters of clearly middle-class Indian and east Asian families. Everyone decked out in new authentic kit (big splurge by dad on the whole family).
The locals people - Islington has the highest rented sector in England including highest social renting - often made do with a replica shirt for the child or two, plus a scarf for mum. Saw Sunni women with their full face covers and a scarf (tied in the correct way!), one wearing an Arsenal hat. Plenty with hats on top of their hijabs. I very much doubt if any of them had ever been to a football match never mind the prices Arsenal want, but they were out there today.
I doubt there is a corner of the world that wasn’t out there to day in large numbers.
Maybe my reference points are limited; Glastonbury at one end, the Gaza ceasefire marches at the other, with maybe the Queen's laying in State and funeral in the middle. Today blew all of that away.