Ebbsfleet United Football Club was born as Gravesend & Northfleet, a merger of two existing neighbouring clubs – Gravesend United and Northfleet United. Both had been playing football in the area since the 1890s, with Northfleet in particular notable as a Tottenham nursery side in the 1930s.

Northfleet Invicta formed in 1892 and a few miles to the east, Gravesend United followed in 1895. Both clubs were soon competing in the Kent League and then Southern League towards the end of the 19th century, playing against the likes of Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United, Southampton and Bristol City.

Money troubles forced both out of the Southern League and into the Kent League in the early 20th century, where the two clubs went head to head regularly in the years leading up to the First World War.

Northfleet United, as they were now known, moved into Stonebridge Road in 1905 and featured in three Kent Senior Cup Finals, winning it in 1910 and again in 1913 against their rivals Gravesend.

The Fleet, or ‘Cementers’ as Northfleet were also known, reformed after the Great War and went from strength to strength in the 1920s, winning a record five successive Kent Senior Cups and regaining a place in the Southern League for three seasons at the end of the decade.

Gravesend had not fared so well and didn’t reform until 1932, playing at a ground on Central Avenue in the Kent County Amateur League.

Northfleet, meanwhile, had developed a link with Tottenham Hotspur through the 1920s and into the 1930s, serving as a nursery for some of White Hart Lane’s brightest and best young talents. Players who would go on to win Tottenham’s first league title after the Second World War learned their stuff at Stonebridge Road, with names including Bill Nicholson, Sid Rowe, Ted Ditchburn, Ron Burgess, Freddie Cox, Les Bennett, George Ludford and Les Medley pulling on the red and white of the Fleet.

In all, Northfleet won 11 Kent League titles, 10 Kent Senior Cups, five Kent League Cups and numerous other honours in their 50 years of existence.

The Fleet’s guiding light, club president Joe Lingham who had helped form Northfleet as a young player in 1892, died in 1943 and with him went the driving force behind the club. Having shut its doors on the outbreak of war in 1939, Stonebridge Road never welcomed back Northfleet United… but a new venture was in motion.