Through The Ages Podcast

O's Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Leyton Orient F.C.

Sports EN ↓ 5 episodes

Leyton Orient were founded in 1881 by a cricket club in East London. They named themselves after a shipping company. They have spent most of their existence in the lower reaches of the Football League, winning nothing that anybody outside of E10 would consider significant. They have also survived two world wars, a string of financial disasters, an Italian owner who appointed eleven managers in three years, and relegation from the Football League after 112 consecutive years of membership. Orient Through the Ages is a ten-episode series — roughly thirty minutes each — covering the full history o...

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Through The Ages Podcast

Episodes

Episode 5 : The Boy from Archway - Bloomfield's Orient, Laurie Cunningham, and the Decade the Club Rediscovered Itself (1966–1977) 07.06.2026 23:50

Send us Fan Mail In 1974, a seventeen-year-old from Archway who had been rejected by Arsenal joined Leyton Orient. His name was Laurie Cunningham. Three years later he was sold to West Bromwich Albion for £110,000. By 1979 he was at Real Madrid. Within a decade he had changed English football forever — and the club that made him, that first saw what he could be and gave him the freedom to become i...

Episode 4: A Season in the Sun - The Golden Age, Johnny Carey, and the One Year at the Top (1955–1966) 29.04.2026 21:12

Send us Fan Mail On the afternoon of 24 August 1962, Leyton Orient beat Middlesbrough 3-1 in Division One. It was their first ever top-flight match. In the crowd were two schoolboys who would grow up to write Cats and Requiem . On the pitch was a centre-forward who had once worked in the mines and scored goals as if he was born to do nothing else. This is the golden episode — the one that every Or...

Episode 3: Coming Home - The Long Lower Leagues, a New Name, and a Ground Called Brisbane Road (1929–1955) 31.03.2026 24:06

Send us Fan Mail For twenty-six years between the wars and after them, Orient were a club in transition — and occasionally in crisis. Relegated from Division Two in 1929. Evicted from their ground in 1930. Forced to play at a speedway stadium with a cinder track around the pitch. Temporarily renamed Clapton Orient again, then back again, as if the club couldn't quite decide who it was. This e...

Episode 1: The Cricketers' Club - From Glyn Road to the Football League (1881–1905) 06.03.2026 22:23

Send us Fan Mail In the summer of 1881, a group of cricketers from a nonconformist college in Homerton, East London, decided they needed something to do in the winter. They started playing football. They needed a name. One of their players worked for a shipping company whose vessels sailed east — towards India, towards China, towards the Far East. They called themselves Orient. This is the first e...

Episode 2: They Took the Lead - Clapton Orient, the Footballers' Battalion, and the Cost of War ( 1905–1929) 06.03.2026 28:46

Send us Fan Mail In December 1914, with the First World War four months old, ten Clapton Orient players attended a recruiting meeting at Fulham Town Hall and enlisted together. They were the first Football League club to enlist en masse. Within two years, three of them were dead on the Somme. This episode covers the first quarter-century of Orient's life in the Football League — early respect...