The first of these factors, immigration, has brought Leicester into the national spotlight in recent years. Since the Fifties, when small numbers arrived from the Commonwealth, the city has increasingly become known as a place of different cultures and faiths. Some 20,000 South Asians came during the Seventies, not from India but East Africa, where they had settled under the British Empire. Leicester is also home to Somali, Polish and Romanian minorities. But in 2022, the city’s vaunted harmony was ruptured by clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Highfields and the neighbouring Belgrave area. In a foreshadowing of the recent riots that followed the Southport stabbings, authorities in Leicester blamed the unrest on false claims spreading via social media, including rumours of attacks on places of worship and the attempted kidnapping of a Muslim girl. The mayor Peter Soulsby spoke of a campaign to recruit troublemakers from outside the city. But other accounts of the disturbances — including one I heard from a long-standing Gujarati resident in the city — have drawn attention to the recent arrival, via Portugal, of more assertive Hindus from the Indian regions of Daman and Diu.

The spectre of sectarian politics returned at last month’s general election. In Leicester South, the constituency where Highfields is located, former Labour frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth saw his 22,000 majority overturned by an independent, the optometrist Shockat Adam, who channelled the anger of local Muslims over the war in Gaza. Ashworth complained that “I’ve never known a campaign of such vitriol, such bullying, such intimidation,” saying he was barred from mosques and chased down streets. Meanwhile, the only Conservative gain of the entire election came in Leicester East, apparently confirming the drift of the city’s Hindus towards the Tories.

These ructions may help to explain the suspicion I encountered in Leicester, from both council employees and members of the public. Many people did not want to speak to me or be seen speaking to me. Then again, I saw no signs of religious tension, with the exception of one angry diatribe about immigrants, and that came from an elderly Sikh man who had moved here in the Sixties. Leicester has also remained relatively peaceful during the widespread anti-immigration protests and riots of the past fortnight. Most of my conversations pointed to a different, more material problem raised by immigration: the difficulty of finding housing in a city that is growing rapidly, even as its authorities struggle with overstretched resources.

Recent demographic data for Leicester presents a picture of remarkable change. The city’s population was estimated at about 380,000 last year, a rise of 15% since 2011. The increase in its foreign-born residents has been greater than its overall population growth, suggesting that the latter has mainly been driven by international migration. In a single year to July 2023, the equivalent of 3.6% of the city’s population arrived from overseas. But Leicester has only added 25,000 new houses since 2001, despite gaining four times as many new residents. It is now one of the most densely populated local authorities outside London, a density that its ageing, low-rise housing stock is not well placed to handle.

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One result of this is fierce competition in the rental market. Leicester’s prices are rising even faster than London’s. An estate agent in Highfields told me she had received 10 calls in a matter of hours for a two-bed house at £900 per month, which is above the city average. She also said she did not struggle to find housing for newly arrived immigrants, since they tended to have good jobs — often in the NHS — and to be hard-working, wanting to “make a better life”. It is more difficult, of course, for those in the gig economy. The father of one family I met, who is an Uber driver, told me they had been looking for a one-bed flat in Leicester for six months, having originally moved to London from India in 2022.

Other losers in the housing market are those working for low wages, such as east Leicester’s textile workers. Their situation has become even worse since the local clothing industry was decimated by the Covid pandemic and soaring energy costs. Similar issues exist in white working-class areas in the west of the city. A 21-year-old street cleaner said he was still living with his dad and had no intention of moving. When I asked if this would make it difficult to start a family, he told me he already had a partner and two children there with him. Apparently most of his friends have similar arrangements.

All this has contributed to a surge of claims on the local authority. In 2022, Leicester City Council officially declared a crisis due to the numbers on its waiting lists for social housing, reported to be 6,400 households late last year. Half of those applicants qualify due to overcrowding in their existing homes; I heard of two-bed properties housing as many as 15 people. Yet the council’s ability to provide housing has been steadily undermined by a high uptake of Right to Buy, the Thatcherite policy which allows social tenants to purchase their homes at a discounted rate. It lost nearly 2,000 properties in this way in the five years up to 2022.

Recent years have also seen a dramatic rise in homelessness. Faced with the costs of housing hundreds of homeless families in bed and breakfasts and other temporary accommodation, the council this year borrowed £45 million to buy and rent more properties. It also cited the costs of 1,000 asylum decisions expected this year, and has taken out further loans to accommodate those arriving through humanitarian schemes.

The need for more housing in Leicester is evident; the question is where, and how quickly, it can be built. In theory, the obvious solution is to increase the density of terraced streets like those in Highfields, by building upwards. Yet even with Labour’s much-hyped planning reforms, a city like Leicester has neither the financial capacity nor the policy tools for such a challenge. Instead, it is currently committed to adding around 1,300 new houses annually, a target that is basically unchanged since 2006. The council cites lack of land as a constraint, though there are signs of the inefficiencies that have plagued house-building in Britain more generally. A large development in the north of the city, Ashton Green, received planning permission for 3,000 houses in 2011 (the site had been earmarked since the Seventies), but so far just 208 have been completed.

Housing shortages place heavy strains on the social fabric, and as such, they cannot be neatly separated from Leicester’s recent political convulsions. Few forms of deprivation are as liable to fuel resentment and undermine trust as the lack of a secure home.  Writing in The Guardian, Yohann Koshy suggests that a sense of dwindling resources has given life in the city “an edge of desperation”, as “communities compete for what remains”. In his victory speech, the new Leicester South MP Shockat Adam declared “this is for the people of Gaza”, but he has since claimed that “when I spoke at events or on my campaign trail, housing was the number-one issue”. Progressives rightly emphasise the impact of austerity on local authorities since 2010, which has left places like Leicester unable to handle issues such as unemployment, overcrowding and homelessness. The on-going consequences of Liz Truss’ disastrous financial experiment have made these significantly worse. But the charge sheet against Westminster must also include immigration policy.

Whatever one thinks of mass immigration in cultural or economic terms, the fact is that successive governments have rapidly increased the country’s population with no realistic plan for housing it with dignity. These were deeply irresponsible decisions, contributing to the return of slum conditions in many parts of Britain. The recent outbreaks of violence against migrants will only make politicians more reluctant to acknowledge the link between immigration and housing shortages; and yet, while this certainly leaves an open goal for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, it is foolish to imagine that only those who consider themselves native Brits will feel aggrieved. In British cities, it is often immigrants and the children of immigrants who must bear the instability of large, chaotic population flows, denying them the opportunity to put down roots. Leicester is a clear example of this, as the struggle for affordable housing afflicts a population that is well over 40% foreign-born.

However, Leicester’s recent experience also points to changes unfolding beyond urban Britain. When the city’s council said it was unable to meet new housing targets in 2020, an agreement was reached for an “overspill” of 18,700 houses be built in surrounding parts of Leicestershire instead. For some local authorities, such as Blaby and North West Leicestershire, this means doubling their existing housebuilding quotas up to 2036. This has not been without controversy. Local news is full of scare stories about housing developments swamping small villages and golf courses, while several Conservative MPs with constituencies bordering Leicester have protested the overspill scheme. Neil O’Brien, who represents Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, demanded that the city “meet its own housing needs locally, rather than dump it onto surrounding districts”.

Such tensions between city, suburb, town and countryside were bound to be a result of Britain’s housing shortfall. They have now reappeared at a national level, as Labour’s newly announced formulas shift housebuilding quotas from inner cities to less built-up (and less reliably Labour-voting) areas. These plans will doubtless meet with plenty of local friction, but the overall trajectory is already clear. Visit an affluent, medium-sized British town with decent transport links — a town such as Market Harborough, in O’Brien’s constituency, which is 15 minutes from Leicester and an hour from London — and the chances are that you will see redbrick new-builds going up around its outskirts. Given their available and affordable land, these places will inevitably be the focus of development over the next decades.

And they will become more of a destination for migration as well. Since their residents skew older and wealthier, there is demand for the kinds of service jobs and social care positions that many new arrivals occupy. At the same time, they will continue attracting middle-class Brits from immigrant backgrounds, who are doing as the middle classes always do and moving outwards from the suburbs. Since the post-war era, the story of migration to Britain has been dominated by urban, often relatively deprived areas like Highfields; the next chapter will also be set in leafy satellite towns.

To cap it off, 13 minutes after the final whistle, Mark Selby, “the Jester from Leicester”, won the World Snooker Championship for the second time. Both Selby and the Foxes had followed in the footsteps of Leicester Tigers, who secured their eighth Rugby Union Premiership three years previously, and Leicestershire County Cricket Club, who won their third T20 Cup in 2011. Leicester, it seemed, was the centre of the sporting world.

In the years since, however, the cricket team has not won anything, while the Tigers only won the Premiership again in 2022 after a long drought. Although Selby, recovering from a run of poor form related to his depression, reached the final of the World Snooker Championship again this month, he lost to the Belgian Luca Brecel. Then, on Sunday, came the greatest disappointment of all, as Leicester City were relegated from the Premier League. Seven years after that glorious Bank Holiday Monday, the city’s decline has started to feel endemic. How did it come to this?

There used to be a bar at Leicester station — or rather, a counter selling pasties and sandwiches that also sold cans of lager and had a small room next to it, fitted out with perhaps half a dozen small tables. Having written their match reports, London-based journalists would meet there before getting the train home. Its walls were a celebration of great Leicester personalities: not just David Attenborough and Gary Lineker, but Willie Thorne, Engelbert Humperdinck, Kate O’Mara, Showaddywaddy…

The bar disappeared years ago and, on the day Leicester lifted the league title, its absence was unnerving but also, it seemed, rather fitting. Andrea Bocelli sang on the pitch before kick-off as the grimy traditions of its former stadium Filbert Street yielded to the slightly antiseptic surrounds of the King Power: here, the fans are obsessed, in a way no other club’s are, by those weird cardboard clappers, as though they suddenly felt banging their hands together was not quite the modern thing. It was better than what had gone before but just as surely something had been lost. If that bar still existed, Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and Wes Morgan, the heroes of 2015-16, would surely take pride of place.

A Champions League quarter-final followed, then two fifth-place finishes and, in 2021, a first ever FA Cup success. Even last season, widely seen as a disappointment, Leicester finished eighth. But did Leicester itself ever seem like a city on the up? Perhaps sport casts an illusory glow. Perhaps too much was read into the discovery of Richard III under a car park in the city a decade ago, but it served to underline the impression of Leicester as a place where exciting things were happening, even if 40% of the city’s population reside in the most deprived 20% of areas in the country.

That illusion, though, was firmly punctured during the pandemic, when Leicester became the first British city to lock down following a spike that was largely blamed on Dickensian conditions in textile factories — a Sunday Times investigation later uncovered a string of sweatshops where workers were paid just £3.50 an hour. “Leicester endured the longest, most crippling lockdown of anyone in the UK,” says Lee Marlow, a Leicester fan and lecturer at De Montfort University. “You can see the effect of that in the city today. Empty shops, streets that have seen better days. Businesses, pubs, restaurants that clung on but never recovered.”

Then, in late summer last year, Leicester endured a month of unrest between predominantly British-Pakistani Muslims and predominantly British-Indian Hindus, seemingly sparked by celebrations of India’s cricketing victory over Pakistan in the Asia Cup; football is not the only sport to offer an emotionally fraught manifestation of identity. Over the following month, there were a number of outbreaks of violence and 47 arrests. While investigations agreed social media agitators bore the bulk of the responsibility, the Delhi-based Centre for Democracy, Pluralism and Human Rights blamed “ethnic enclaves” within Leicester. If there had been any naive sense of the city as a place of harmonious immigration, it disappeared then.

Yet tragedy had already interrupted the Leicester City story, when a helicopter carrying the club’s owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, crashed in October 2018, killing all on board. His son, Aiyawatt or “Top”, succeeded him as chairman of both Leicester City and King Power, the Thai retail group, his inheritance making him one of Asia’s five youngest billionaires. But King Power’s main business is duty-free shops in airports, and it was hit hard by the pandemic. This not merely restricted spending on players, but also reportedly made the owners reluctant to sack their manager Brendan Rodgers earlier this season despite the stagnation that infected the locker room.

What will happen next? Well, just as Leicester City’s success boosted the local economy, with EY putting its value at £140m, so relegation will damage it. Leicester’s games will no longer be broadcast worldwide; the city will slowly lose its name recognition. Less prestigious games mean fewer fans and lower footfall on matchdays for the city’s restaurants, shops and pubs.

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But there is also something less tangible. Often, especially now that industry is disappearing, the football club is the most visible emblem of a town or city. I remember the pang of pride I felt as a native Wearsider when, walking through Addis Ababa to find Sylvia Pankhurst’s grave, I came unexpectedly upon an ancient ship’s anchor bearing the legend, “Made in Sunderland”. Work in the shipyards, obviously, was brutally tough, but what a feeling it must have been to send a vessel out into the world knowing it might be spotted in Melbourne or Buenos Aires or Tokyo — or even, inexplicably, 500 miles from the sea on Ethiopia’s central plateau. How is Sunderland projected now? Almost entirely through football. That’s why when clubs from the great provincial cities reach Wembley finals, at least those not wearied by familiarity, they habitually take over Trafalgar Square: it’s not just a celebration of self, but also a reminder to the capital that, however run down they may be, however peripheral they may feel, they are still there.

Leicester, for their part, have done something extraordinary. They didn’t just get to a Cup final: they were the most surprising league champions in English history. Their legend will linger. If any outsider wins it again, it is against Leicester that they will be measured. “In April 2016,” says Paul Simpson, a Leicester fan and founder of FourFourTwo magazine, “most supporters I knew agreed on one thing: as long as we won the Premier League we wouldn’t mind if we ended up playing non-league football in 10 years’ time. We did better than that. As devastating as this relegation is, it is, in part, a reversion to normality. This doesn’t excuse the many bad decisions made this season but it does put this season into perspective. The city will absorb the blow because it is business as usual — this is our eighth relegation in the past 50 years.”

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Supporting a club, especially one below the elite level, is often frustrating. Disappointment is the default. Success can bring ecstasy but, even then, there can be a sense of taking out an emotional mortgage that will take a lifetime to pay off. But all of that is less important than football’s function as a projection of identity, perhaps especially for cities struggling with a sense of declining prestige. Go to Melbourne or Buenos Aires or Tokyo and ask what they know of Leicester, and some may talk of Attenborough or Kasabian or perhaps Joe Orton or Julian Barnes. But most, if they know the city, will know it through Vardy, Mahrez and Morgan. That’s why football matters.

“We’ve not had it easy of late,” says Marlow, “but there have been worse times. We’ll be back. We’ll dust ourselves down. What do they say? One day you’re drinking the wine, the next you’re treading the grapes. We’ll do a bit of that. And they’ll never be able to take it away from us, will they? The Premier League. The FA Cup. The King in a car park. This little city — known all over the world.”

Back in the 1950s and 60s, the Midlands was booming. Leicester at the time had so many jobs that employers waited at the gates of other factories to poach workers, and even chased up potential recruits who forgot to come to interviews. In the decade to 1964, service businesses around Birmingham grew faster than any other part of the country; in 1961, West Midlands households earned more on average than any other British region, including London and the South East.

But all this was ended by London-based planners, who virtually banned new factories, offices and housing south of Manchester in a failed attempt to rebalance the economy. In 1960, the Government even refused Fox’s Glacier Mints permission for a new factory in Leicester to replace its existing building facing demolition for a ring road. That began the story of Fox’s decline in the city, culminating in its recent controversial decision to leave Leicester forever, and illustrates the profound damage caused to the Midlands and the British economy as a whole.

The Midlands boom was nothing new: ancient pottery shows a manufacturing hub since the Bronze Age, and throughout the Middle Ages it could compete with the south in terms of wealth: in the 14th century, the West Midlands were among the richest places in Europe. William the Conqueror’s favourite, William Peverel, doubled the size of Nottingham soon after the Conquest, and much later Daniel Defoe was to call it one of the most beautiful towns in England.

The area was central to the Industrial Revolution, among its heroes of innovation being Abraham Darby, who smelted iron using Black Country coke rather than charcoal, and James Watt and Matthew Boulton, who began to commercially develop steam engines. But this growth and prosperity would continue into the 20th century, as other industrialised areas of Britain fell into relative decline.

From 1911 to 1954 the West Midlands grew real output per person faster than any other region, to reach the highest outside the South East. Leicester, which dates back to an Iron Age settlement predating the Roman invasion, was by the 1930s the second most prosperous city in Europe; it later had Britain’s first local radio station.

Meanwhile Coventry, which was already a substantial settlement before the Norman Conquest, with a monastery founded by Leofric, Earl of Mercia — although his wife is better remembered for an altogether different reason — was the fifth wealthiest town in England by the reign of Henry VIII, beaten only by Bristol, Newcastle, Norwich and London. Again by the mid-20th century it was booming, with the fastest population growth of any British city both between the wars and from 1950 to 1965. In the 1930s  it was such a magnet of prosperity that two-fifths of its residents were from other parts of the country. In 1953, unemployment fell to 0.8%; a 1959 Times article called it a “powerhouse of technical progress” and “an Eldorado for its workers”.

Birmingham, seen by guidebooks as “the cradle of England’s industrial greatness”, grew from 8,000 people in 1700 to over a million in 1931 — overtaking Manchester in 1861 and Liverpool in 1881. Strongly Liberal and run by Joseph Chamberlain, in 1890 it was described by Harper’s as “the Best-Governed City in the World”. The 1911 Greater Birmingham Act made Birmingham three times the area of Glasgow and twice that of Manchester, Liverpool or Belfast.

The city was famous, above all, for its industry. From the 1600s to the 1800s, enterprising locals dug 35 miles of canals — more than Venice — to carry Birmingham’s huge trade, these barges first powered by England’s uniquely strong shire horses and then by England’s coal deposits.

Between the wars, Birmingham’s products included a coining press for Tibet’s mint, rolling stock for electrified suburban lines of Buenos Aires, and pipelines for oil through Iraq. From 1923 to 1937, its formal working population grew nearly twice as fast as the country as a whole. Historian Lord Briggs wrote that “Birmingham was more adaptable […] and succeeded in retaining its industrial supremacy” even though its initial advantages — coal, iron ore, and limestone — were lost.

The city became a global powerhouse, with the terminus for the world’s first two long-distance railway lines — the Grand Junction railway to the North and Robert Stephenson’s London and Birmingham Railway. It saw the invention of compact cavity magnetrons for radar, and the first design of a practical nuclear weapon. It remained Britain’s most prosperous city after London as late as the 1970s.

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But national government saw the success of the Midlands as damaging other regions. The Distribution of Industry Act 1945 sought to stop industrial growth in the “Congested Areas” — the Midlands, East Anglia and the South East — and to push industry to declining “Development Areas” in the North and West. Entrepreneurs had to get an “Industrial Development Certificate” (IDC) before building a new factory.

The 1956 West Midlands Plan even set Birmingham a 1960 target population far lower than its actual 1951 population — so people would have to leave, and industry shrink. The controls made it difficult to regenerate businesses or add new ones, and the economy became less diverse, focused on the motor industry. That left it vulnerable to the recession of the 1980s, which badly affected the Midlands.

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The Certificates failed even to work as the planners intended. Of the projects refused, a study found that only 18% instead went ahead in an area approved by the government, and many of those were in the South East. Half of the refused projects were just reduced in size to escape IDC control; 31% of refusals led to closure, reorganisation or abandonment. So IDCs prevented or destroyed several jobs for every job successfully moved.

Those requirements blocked most post-war growth in Midlands factories. But for 20 years, there was no limit on service businesses, and so Midlands entrepreneurs turned to those; despite the planning madness, the Midlands flourished.

From 1953 to 1964, service sector employment around Birmingham boomed, with major British and international banks, professional and scientific services, finance and insurance, adding three million square feet of office space. In the decade from 1951, Birmingham created more jobs than any city except London, with unemployment generally below 1%.

But then in 1964, the Government declared Birmingham’s growth “threatening”, and banned further office development for almost two decades. To add insult to injury to the region, its cities suffered among the worst architectual destruction of that decade, with much of old Victorian Birmingham torn down and medieval Coventry destroyed.

What would have happened without these disastrous policies? The size of a country’s cities normally follows a rule called ‘“Zipf’s law”, by which the second largest city is half the size of the largest, but Britain is an exception. By one estimate, Birmingham should have twice as many people, and Nottingham a third more. Those shortfalls, perhaps also due to years of transport neglect, are staggering.

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The deliberate strangulation of the booming industries of the Midlands and other high-wage places by London planners was partly why, in the late 1960s and 70s, we became the “sick man of Europe” as average earnings dropped behind our continental friends and rivals. Adjusted for purchasing power, British spending per head was overtaken by West Germany, France and Italy, and ever since we have been playing catch-up. We have now again overtaken Italy and France, but Germany is still about 17% higher. Germany had no equivalent to IDCs; France and Italy’s were much more flexible.

Blaming bad planning for low growth is no pie in the sky. One of Britain’s most respected economic historians, Nicholas Crafts, says we could raise average annual growth by two percentage points for an entire decade by fixing our planning system: if we had done that earlier, today’s GDP would be more than one-fifth higher. That would mean plentiful jobs with higher wages. We would have more money for education and healthcare.

To grow and overtake Germany again, we need to unleash the Midlands and other regions — giving them more power to grow, with world-class transport. The injustice cannot be undone, but we can free Mercia to regain its former glory.

It’s quiet today because it’s raining, but all through our serial lockdowns, my local park has remained lively. While Leicester’s professional sporting venues — Grace Road (cricket), King Power (football) and Welford Road (rugby) — stand empty, park life has sustained the sporting life of the city after the old, archaic meaning. From toddlers pushing baby walkers to old guys on the trot, from kids walking the plank (arms-out), to teenagers sullen on the swings (arms-in), from some pretty serious Indian fast bowling at one end to some pretty unserious English tag rugby — both sexes, not very distant — at the other. I could go on, but you’ve all got a park and you know what I mean. There are more ways to sport than playing football for £290,000 per week.

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It has been calculated that “green infrastructure” provides Britain with £34.2bn benefits every year. I don’t know how they know that, and even if they do, it all sounds a bit sterile to me. The good that municipal parks do is there for all to see, and never more self-evident than in recent months.

Victoria Park used to be Leicester’s race course. Fashionable punters would disport their way up New Walk to get there. Racing ended in 1882 and the park opened in 1883. Old Aylestonians Rugby Football Club was founded in 1919 and has played Saturday afternoons here ever since. Club headquarters is The Old Horse. Quite sporting for a one-year-old, my grandson thought it fun to drop his arm straight down a player’s pint.

Rugby, football and cricket dominate according to the seasons, as the park changes too, from bright verdant mornings in the Spring, to inky pinky sunsets in the Winter. Keep fit apparatus runs around the perimeter, which is clever of it, as do families on the Saturday morning fun run. Over by the playground, the park thickens with bushes and a wildlife pond, perfect for a bit of (never to be under-estimated) nature-watching and finding what parks have always offered, relief from the town.

Every May the Caribbean Carnival swivels its way through the wrought iron gates, and it was here that local band Kasabian played to fans in 2016 — the year in which Leicester supporters (and a very big Italian contingent) covered the park in blue. When the team arrived with the Premier League trophy, 50,000 people sang Volare to Ranieri the manager while he conducted as if they were a great opera chorus, which of course, in a way, they were.

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There used to be a croquet and bowls club but I can’t find it. It seems to have been swallowed by a builder’s yard now morphing into a meadow. And dominating the entire skyline is the University of Leicester. Founded in 1919 as a war memorial, its motto is Ut Vitam Habeant. Which they do.

All this popular amusement used to be a big part of what sport meant. Blur’s 1994 hit Parklife captures it perfectly. “All the people”. “So many people”. “And they all go hand in hand through their parklife”. “Know what I mean?” Certainly do, Phil.

Apart from the grass cutting, none of this costs much. It’s a state of mind: cheap, amusing and near to hand — which is, as my book explains, exactly how the English used to sport in their old parish wakes, or at their Shrove Tuesday football, or in all those mad games and festivals which at least once a year denoted liberty and belonging to all who took part. Stamford used to run bulls and it took the NSPCA, Lincoln Assizes, the Home Office, the 14th Dragoon Guards, the patronage of Queen Victoria and a big dollop of the Metropolitan Police to stop them.

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Sport in the time of the virus, though, is not just outdoors. While elite sport founders in its billions looking as deracinated as it really is, our lockdown world has taken up those fine old British indoor sports of kitchen curling (aka cleaning the floor), skittles (tins of baked beans), balloon tennis over the sofa (an old favourite), and keepie-uppy with a toilet roll.

C. B. Fry (1872-1956) was a world class athlete who did it all. He scored a century against the Australians. He won a Cup Final medal with Southampton. He played right back for England. He held the World Long Jump record, wrote thrilling sports stories and declined the throne of Albania. But his favourite sport cost nothing and was performed entirely indoors — an amusing party piece where he’d jump up onto the mantelpiece from a standing position. Backwards.

I started writing This Sporting Life thinking the history of sport was important, but not that important. I finished it seeing the sporting life as one of our great civil cultures expressing our deepest national instincts.

I’ve stressed the custom and belonging aspects because they are most apposite to life in the time of the virus. But the book deals with other elements as well, including an equestrian world that says everything you need to know about the gentry, a prize-fighting underworld that stood for what we might call the plebeian side of national honour, local festivals that reflected how people saw their freedoms, and all those sports and games that flowered in schools and colleges as distinctive ways of being young. Then, of course, there was Association Football: England’s gift to the world. Football slipped its village moorings and became not only modern but modernist.

William James once said that the first demonstration of free will is to believe in free will. Football works against all determinisms. Every match involves absolute freedom of movement within set limits, which, come to think about it, is about as near to an everyday expression of liberal freedom as we can get. You could privatise the land to deny the people their sport, but you could never privatise the social solidarities that sport embedded. Where parish wakes ended, football took off. Sometimes a football crowd on the move can look like the parish on a war footing.

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Historically, people had little choice in where they lived or who with. They had to get on with it and like it, and being for the most part excluded from educated opinion, they found their own forms of expression. They didn’t call sport patriotism and they never called it nationalism. They were simply tapping-in to what was available.

Eric Hobsbawm famously remarked that the nation, comprising millions, “seems more real as a team of eleven named players”. This is fair enough as far as it goes but it misses the larger and far more untidy point that it works the other way as well. Patriotism in Britain has never really been about the great and the good as about faith in each other. Nobody ever cheered a national team for being better than them. They cheer it for being part of them, a piece of the main.

This is something intellectuals such as Fintan O’Toole and Pankaj Mishra, who portray the English as the upper-class gullible led by the lower-class stupid, do not understand. They like to claim Orwell, but not the Orwell who suddenly realised that if the working class was patriotic, it was patriotic in its own way, after its own heroes. ‘The great and the good’, lest we forget, is strictly ironic. Royals and politicians always look like fish out of water at Cup Finals because, deep down, they know it’s not about them. It’s about us.

I started in Victoria Park Leicester. In a piece for Literary Review, Sean O’ Brien cites Pearson Park in Hull as “the centre of imaginative operations” for England’s greatest poet Philip Larkin. On that park, no different from thousands of others like it, Larkin looked from his high windows on the kids and the football, on the fog and the litter bins, and turned what was ordinary into moments which, taken together, have entered the nation’s soul.

Here’s to This Sporting Life.

Robert Colls’ This Sporting Life. Sport and Liberty in England 1760-1960 (Oxford University Press) is published on Thursday.

To make a filthy joke is the most obvious first reaction to hearing the news of the campaign to mount a statue of the playwright Joe Orton in his hometown of Leicester. The extremely rude and extremely funny playwright would surely do the same.

But then what? Would he really want such an accolade? You can understand the public interest: Orton’s sudden rise to theatrical fame in 1964 with the plays Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot, and his sudden death at the hands of his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, just three years later, will continue to fascinate for as long as celebrity, bad taste and death continue to fascinate human beings. His diaries are a candid chronicle of that outrageous life. In fact, his true-life story and its grisly denouement have rather blotted out the plays themselves. (There are only three full-length ones – Sloane was followed by Loot in 1966 and the third, What the Butler Saw, was produced posthumously.)

More famous, arguably, is the 1987 biopic, Prick Up Your Ears, by Alan Bennett and Stephen Frears starring Gary Oldman, which cemented the public image of Orton into the cultural consciousness – a prodigiously promiscuous homosexual and brilliant writer of black comedies who came to a sad end because of jealousy both sexual and professional. So perhaps, then, since the mores of British society have shifted so much since 1967 – Orton was murdered mere days after male homosexuality was made legal –  it’s appropriate he should receive this statuary immorality, as much a reminder of that precocious talent as of righted wrongs.

But I’m still not entirely convinced. I think Orton’s work, which sadly exists under the shadow of his life and death, is as much in opposition to the values of today as it was to the values of the 1960s. And we are in danger of smoothing away the jagged edges of his genius. There are broken bottles in there.

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There is something admirable in campaigning for the civic commemoration of a person whose entire schtick is a condemnation of civic society, who was sent to prison for the systematic defacing of library books, and whose final play ends with the penis from an exploded statue of Churchill being held aloft. Viewed in this light it could almost be seen as what is now known as an “epic troll”. Orton the work – if not Orton the man – is all about mocking the sacred, knocking down the statues.

It’s hard to think of an institution or value that Orton doesn’t punch at in his plays. The work ethic, the war, religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular, the police. The plays are all about the humour to be found in people hiding venal and carnal motives behind respectability – the observant Catholic nurse repeatedly marrying old men for their money following the convenient deaths of their wives, the respectable middle-aged brother and sister who are prepared to overlook the brutal murder of their father in favour of a sexual time-share of his murderer, the policeman who uses the excuse of shining British justice to rough up young men for his own gratification.

There is a still-astonishing lack of compassion and empathy in his work – in fact, that lack may be even more deeply felt by modern audiences. There is explicitly no advocacy for social change. Orton is an uproarious laugh at people and things as they are, with no plan – no hope – for what they should be. All attempts to improve humanity, from prayer to psychoanalysis, are portrayed as humbuggish fronts for people getting what they can for themselves.

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In some of these areas he was not unique for his time; his work fits in with the swell of questioning authority that took place in the Sixties in the theatre and beyond. What makes Orton different from his peers, though, is that he also took shots at things that we still hold to be sacrosanct today, some perhaps even more than in his time: consent, the age of consent, sensitivities about race.

In What the Butler Saw alone, various female characters use the threat of false rape accusations; a barely legal hotel bellboy is enjoyed by the entire company and, offstage, is said to have pleasured a class of schoolgirls; “white golliwogs” are invoked to calm “colour prejudice hotspots”. This is a man who wrote in his diaries about sexual fantasies involving “mentally defective farm labourers”, and that’s one of the more palatable sexual digressions in its pages.

Perhaps the funniest clash between then and now is the claim made by some prominenti of the campaign that Orton was an ‘LGBT+ pioneer’, a ‘trailblazer’, who in that most ghastly word of our times, needs to be ‘celebrated’. Yet he is not a saintly Alan Turing, even less a cuddly cheeky Graham Norton.

It’s tempting to imagine what Orton would make of the modern LGBT movement if he were alive today. It has all the markings of an Orton target – blatant cant, automatically assumed virtue, and recourse to confected outrage when questioned. At the recent Pride event in London, there was a supportive flypast by the Red Arrows, which is possibly the most insanely, gloriously Ortonesque thing that has ever happened in the real world.

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The statue campaign also states that Orton was “the first person to put gay characters on stage”, but even this claim is a bit rum. The randy young men of the plays are all gleefully, mercenarily bisexual. The only exclusively homosexual character in Orton is Ed, the marvellously repressed “uncle” to Mr Sloane, who obsesses about young lads in tight shorts “keeping themselves clean” by doing plenty of strenuous physical exercise and avoiding getting into “trouble” with girls. His sexuality and its repression is something we are encouraged to laugh at. He is certainly not what we would consider a Stonewall role model or good ‘representation’.

This attempt to sanitise and defang Orton is saddening. If he were working today, his latest play would be about randy teenage boys robbing graves while disguised as transwomen in burqas. If there is to be a statue of the great man – and he was great – let it reflect his true, sometimes truly horrible, genius. He should be portrayed with a white golliwog in one hand and a prodigiously endowed 18-year-old in the other, to remind us of how we always need to be upset, and of how funny that can be.