Spurs training ground evacuated after WWII-era bomb scare

There’s been a little bit of excitement at Hotspur Way today, but not the kind you necessarily want. According to the Evening Standard, Tottenham Hotspur’s training facility and the surrounding streets were evacuated on Friday after a device suspected to be a World War II-era bomb was uncovered on the premises.

A Met Police spokesperson said: "Police in Enfield were called at approximately 15:06hrs on Friday, 29 September to Bullmoor Lane, EN1 after a suspected WWII ordnance was uncovered in the Tottenham Hotspur training ground.

"Cordons and road closures have been in place while specialist officers attend and assess the device."

— Evening Standard

Finding an unexploded ordnance from a war that ended 70 years ago would no doubt be shocking to the players and staff that work on the site, but it’s not actually that uncommon to discover them even today. Hundreds of thousands of bombs were dropped on the UK during World War II. Not all of them exploded due to various reasons when they were dropped, and officials are still dealing with the impact of these decades-old munitions as they eventually are uncovered and rediscovered.

No indications were given as to where the device was found in Hotspur Way, or details as to how the device was discovered.

This article from the BBC in 2015 says that there’s no way to know how many more ordnances are still lurking under the ground in the UK, though most of them are probably not a threat of blowing up. That doesn’t lessen the threat that they can pose, however. An unexploded WWII-era bomb was discovered near Wembley Stadium the same year that BBC article was written.

The Standard article does not say whether any players were present at Hotspur Way at the time the object was discovered, and says the all-clear was sounded at 4:30 p.m. local time (11:30 a.m. ET), indicating that the device was either defused or declared safe.

Spurs’ Twitter account posted photographs of the first team departing for Huddersfield to prepare for tomorrow’s match against the Terriers earlier in the day, suggesting none of the players were affected or impacted.

EDIT: False alarm! According to this, it wasn’t a bomb at all. Still, better safe than sorry, right? (And who wants to bet that it WWII flying ace Scott Parker who found it?)