Chaos and skullduggery at South East London’s most charged event: Peckham Conker Club
A conker is a powerful thing. Planted in the right conditions, it will grow into a horse chestnut tree, a magnificent arbor which – if not felled to make a statue of a buddha or a pencil or a boat – could live for three centuries. The horse chestnut tree is not native to Britain. It is Turkish, having appeared on these shores in the 16th century. It took a further two centuries for the people of these islands to develop the game of conkers, with the first match recorded on the Isle of Wight in 1848.
When posters advertising a conker championship appeared around my local common, I was intrigued: who, I wondered, would be the eccentric conker champion of SE15?
The Peckham Conker Championship is, I’d wager, not what you’d expect. Rather than the old fogies you might have expected to play a traditional childhood game, the attendees are almost exclusively white, trendy, young adults.
“I thought it would be in leafy south London park,” says one player, who travelled all the way from Walthamstow. “I wasn’t expecting it to be under the railway arches in a dirty brewery scattered with bins,” she says, half laughing, half horrified, clutching a plastic cup of craft beer.
Nut pumping allowed
The Peckham Conker Championships was first held in October 2017. Last year, more than 250 people from different parts of the UK took part. This year, there were more than 350 players, with at least 500 people in total packed under the railway arches of Brick Brewery.
The reality on the ground is absolute chaos. You could hardly move for yuppies wearing in-fashion trench coats and expensive scarves, all carrying pints of beer and paper plates of artisanal pizza slices. Electronic music pumps, detritus litters the ground. In a setup that’s inherently dangerous, the crowd is made up of spectators jostling in rough circles around groups of players, each person a stray swing away from being whacked in the face by a conker. A stage at the far end platforms the finalists, who have menacing names including “William the Conquerer” and “Harry the Hardnut”.
The club follows ‘Battle Royale’ rules, which is to say there are almost no rules. “Nut pimping” (hardening your conkers) and “stampsies” (stomping on competitors’ nuts if they fall to the ground) are A-okay.
Amongst this crowd was someone I didn’t need a nametag to recognise. “This is my first time playing since I was a kid,” says a bespectacled 41-year-old, twitching like a colt about to be released from the stables.
Steve Dinneen, in action with his conker
It’s City AM Life&Style editor Steve Dinneen, who took part in the competition. “It didn’t take me long to get back into the swing of it,” he says. “Back in the day we used to varnish and grease our conkers so the opponent’s nut would glance off them but nobody seems to be taking it that seriously here.”
Dinneen sailed through the qualifying round, winning six out of seven games but came unstuck in the last 32 against a player going by the name of Lizzie Lowdown.
“It was an unsatisfying game, really,” he says. “There were lots of tangled strings and not many clean shots. I know a bad workman blames his tools but my conker let me down in the end. I had my eye on a podium finish after such a good start but that’s conkers for you. I’ll be back next year now I’ve had a taste for that old-school horse chestnut rivalry.”
Who is the Conker Cat?
Peckham’s Conker Club was founded by Chris Quigley, who refers to himself as the Conker Cat. True to his name, he was dressed in a feline onesie. Quigley is obsessed with these small brown seeds (the Conker Club insists on calling them “nuts”, as part of a macho-rebranding of the original children’s game) and claims to have the world’s largest collection of cellar-aged conkers (the older they are, the harder they get). He spends his autumn days running around the Rye with his dogs, picking up conkers that have fallen from the majestic trees.
“Horse chestnuts are amazingly beautiful, and hugely plentiful, yet completely useless,” he says. “They’re poisonous to humans (and animals) – so don’t eat them – and they mostly end up rotting on the floor.” It’s an enormous waste.
“Because of this, I set myself the goal of doing something positive with them, which is where the idea of Peckham Conker Club came from.” Aside from the championships, Quigley creates and sells merch like the game “Bonkers Conkers,” which includes a rubber conker and elasticated string “resulting in fun & extreme game-play!” He also sells bags of conkers under the name ‘Nut Sacks’.
First Britain, now the world
There are dozens of less boisterous conker clubs across the country, with the crowning competition being the World Championships – launched in 1965 – which were held on Sunday in Northamptonshire, attracting 400 international players and 5,000 spectators. Controversy erupted this year when the winner – an 82-year-old dubbed King Conker – was accused of using a steel conker (the jury is still out on this one). Sometimes, conker shortages or high winds have threatened the event. But participants are tenacious: in 2022, Fee Aylmore won the women’s event after 30 years of trying (albeit her triumph was also besmirched by allegations of nepotism, her father being the same conker champion under investigation for alleged nut tampering).
Perhaps the conker craze in Peckham has to do with the nostalgia of younger-for-longer adults: as people have children later in life, there is a yearning for whimsical fun that might otherwise be had with kids.
The reckless abandon that Peckham’s club offers is, ironically, vanishing from schools, with the game of conkers banned from many playgrounds over fears of broken bones and even nut allergies. Some 14 per cent of teachers surveyed said pupils are forbidden from the activity (likewise, nearly one in 10 noted the game of leapfrog has been banned). Take this with a pinch of salt, however: the Health Service Executive dispelled that rumour, calling it “one of the oldest chestnuts around.”
There is something endearing about this accessible, meaningless pursuit, which takes unironic pleasure in pointless fun. This is not a game that cynically teaches you the ways of our entrenched capitalist system, nor one which will propel you to much fame.
Another factor in the resurgence of adults playing conkers is a simple, primal desire for fun. Peckham – as elsewhere – has seen a mass closure of venues. Canavans, a classic institution combining karaoke with a dingy pool bar (a place I once sang Madonna to an audience that included Christine and the Queens) shut its doors in 2020 after being slapped with a 10pm curfew that would have killed its business. The Montague Arms, a pub and venue, closed in 2018. The Bussey Building followed suit in 2019.
In their wake other venues have sprung up. One is Four Quarters, a place stuffed with arcade machines (and a club downstairs). Another is SET, a member’s club loosely aimed at artists, which offers film nights, quizzes, reading groups and other “community” events. Even adult ball-pits are popping up (thankfully not in Peckham, though).
Watching grown men wrestle on the floor attempting to destroy or defend what is essentially a ubiquitous, dung-coloured seed is a curious experience, best done with a cup of craft beer in hand. The winner this year – who claimed a 22 carat golden “nut” – was the dark-haired Italian Pietro the Pummeller, who defended his title to thunderous applause from a crowd captivated by his extravagant technique and lively showmanship.
There is something endearing about this accessible, meaningless pursuit, which takes unironic pleasure in pointless fun. This is not a game that cynically teaches you the ways of our entrenched capitalist system, nor one which will propel you to much fame. You try telling that, however, to the 500 nuts whooping and cheering their hearts out last weekend.