ANYONE WITH THE slightest interest in English football will undoubtedly know that West Ham are moving to the Olympic Stadium in time for the 2016/17 season. Apparently, a new bright shiny stadium will herald a bright shiny future for the club. But, to be perfectly honest, I don’t want to go.

We are told that what’s needed is a ground more accessible for supporters, allowing bigger crowds to watch the games and enabling the club to become a major force in the land. The funny thing is the case being put forward to justify uprooting to Stratford sounds remarkably like the one that took us to the Boleyn Ground more than 100 years ago.

At the turn of the twentieth century, impressively whiskered directors decided that the Memorial Grounds stadium in Canning Town, where West Ham first played after starting life as Thames Ironworks, was no longer fit for purpose and earmarked a site in the borough of East Ham that would … be more accessible, allow bigger crowds to watch the games and – you’ve guessed it – enable the club to become a major force in the land.

Ever since it was confirmed that we are to leave the area that has been the club’s home since 1904, I’ve been chalking off each game played there in the same way a condemned man scratches the wall of his prison cell to mark the passing of his last days on Earth – knowing the hangman’s noose will inevitably be wrapped around his neck at the end of it all. Frankly, it’s not a good way to feel.

Other clubs have moved to new stadiums, I know. The trouble is West Ham isn’t another club – it’s my club. And I’m not sure how to pack up a lifetime of memories that were fermented in London E13 and ship them off to another postal district.

Let me take you on an unofficial tour of the ground. Perhaps, then, you will understand why I am so reluctant to leave.

I’m assuming you got here from one of the smarter parts of London on the District line via Upton Park Tube station and then took the short walk south down Green Street, passing notable local landmarks such as the Queens pub and Ken’s café on the way. Each to their own, of course, but I’m not all that keen on the Queens. If you’d fancied a pint on the way you’d have done better getting off at Plaistow and looking in at the Black Lion. Alternatively, you could have stayed on until East Ham, strolled along the High Street until you reached the junction with the Barking Road, and popped into the Denmark Arms, which has a sticky-carpet charm all of its own. What you don’t want to do if you come again is make the fatal mistake of alighting at West Ham station – it’s a bloody long walk from there.

We are now at the main gates – the John Lyall gates – the ones that were adorned with scarves and shirts and teddy bears and all sorts of other claret and blue stuff when, in 1993, we were robbed of Bobby Moore by that filthy little cheat, cancer. You probably saw the pictures in the newspapers.

If you are not of the claret and blue persuasion yourself, you may well think the theatre of disturbing dreams we are now entering is called Upton Park. Let me put you straight on that one, me old china plate (I told you I was fluent in rhyming slang). Upton Park is the geographical area from which the Tube station takes its name. But the football stadium is officially the Boleyn Ground – so-called in memory of a castle that wasn’t really a castle at all.

The ‘Boleyn Castle’ was a rather strange-looking affair, built in 1544 and boasting vague connections to the woman over whom Henry VIII lost his head before he decided she must lose hers. Some romantics say Anne lived there, others reckon she merely visited from time to time. Sadly, they are wrong – she had been executed eight years before the place was built. However, Green Street House, which stood in the grounds that West Ham had rented from the Catholic Church, became known locally as the Boleyn Castle – hence the name of the stadium that stands before you.

Directly ahead, you will have noticed those two rather large and tacky replicas of castle turrets, which celebrate West Ham’s links with Tudor England. Talk about rewriting history! For years the club’s owners were desperate to knock down the original building, and finally managed to do so in 1955.

On your right is the players’ car park. I agree, some of those motors do look distinctly pricey. (Remind me to tell you about the time I nearly got run over by Mido coming out of there in his Rolls-Royce. I guess if you are going to get knocked down by a car, a Roller is as good as anything, but you don’t want it driven by Mido – he was terrible.)

Over there is the club shop. If you’re after a souvenir, I suggest you pop in and get something now. The queues are murder on match day – they have security guys on the doors to ensure that it doesn’t get too crowded in there, although I suspect that has more to do with crime prevention than the comfort of the customers.

Right, let me show you where it all started for me. Squeeze yourself through these ridiculously tight turnstiles and join me in the Trevor Brooking Stand.

When I first went to the Boleyn Ground back in the ’60s, this was known as the North Bank and it’s where I stood. It was cheap to get in and allowed you to look like a hard case without ever running the risk of direct confrontation with the opposition hooligans, who generally parked themselves at the other end of the ground. No one – and I mean no one – ever ‘took’ the West Ham North Bank, which meant you could stand up straight and confidently sing that you hated Bill Shankly; you hated the Kop and were prepared to fight Man United until you dropped. We didn’t give a widdle and we didn’t give a wank – we were the West Ham North Bank! They just don’t write lyrics like that any more.

This, of course, was many years before Lord Justice Taylor decreed that football grounds had to be all-seater. The North Bank was a concrete terrace, punctuated with metal crash barriers that were there to minimise the danger when the crowd surged forward. What would have minimised the danger even more was if the idiots at the back had refrained from setting off a nerve-jangling human tidal wave by shoving the people in front of them simply for the fun of it, but I suppose folk had to make their own entertainment back in those days. It was tempting to lean on a barrier, but you soon discovered it was better to have it at your back – that way you were less likely to find yourself unexpectedly and unwillingly hurtling down the terracing when the pushing began. For me, the fact that this involuntary cascade was often accompanied by the strains of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ made it no more enjoyable.

There were other problems involved with standing on the terraces – not least the waterfall of urine that started at half time and was sometimes still trickling underfoot at the final whistle. But there were advantages, too. You could congregate with your mates, for one thing. And if you didn’t have any mates, you could at least get together with a group of like-minded individuals who wanted to sing their hearts out in the name of West Ham United and tell the world that east London is wonderful, with the reasons why (I won’t go into those here because they are somewhat offensive).

There’s no doubt that a crowd generates considerably more of an atmosphere when it’s standing. But, as things stand, you can’t. Stand, that is. Not at a Premier League ground anyway.

The people championing the idea of ‘safe standing’ – notably the Football Supporters’ Federation – are adamant they don’t want to see a return to the vast open terraces of a bygone age. And those of us who stood on what were sometimes nothing more than crumbling death traps will say ‘hear, hear’ to that.

But, more than twenty years after Taylor called for all-seater stadiums, some people do still want to stand at football matches. West Ham supporters do it as a matter of course at away games – and some do it at home fixtures too – notably in the lower tier of the Trevor Brooking Stand.

The answer, says the FSF, is an arrangement that is proving increasingly popular in some parts of the world, particularly Germany, known as rail seating. The technology varies slightly from system to system, but the general idea is that in limited areas of the ground there are seats that can fold up flush with their metal housing, and then be locked in the upright position. The structure that encases the seats comes with a high back and a rail, which gives the row of supporters behind something to lean on.

You buy a ticket for the seat and stand in front of it – unless your club happens to be involved in a Champions League game and then the seats are unlocked and you sit down. Until your team scores, of course, and then there’s every likelihood you will stand up again…

The FSF wants to give the idea of safe standing a trial run in the UK, which seems eminently reasonable to me. It will never happen at Upton Park, but there are suggestions it might get a trial run at the Olympic Stadium. David Blackmore, who edits the West Ham fanzine Blowing Bubbles, is convinced it will happen after talking to David Gold. The club’s co-owner told him:

Blackmore is a persuasive man – he talked me into writing a regular column for him in return for nothing more than a pint from time to time (which, considering I am a professional journalist and the shop steward who is supposed to ensure my colleagues at The Guardian and The Observer are properly rewarded for their labour, is no mean feat). But he can’t persuade me we’ll ever get safe standing – the concept has too many opponents.

One of the most powerful voices to speak out against it belongs to Margaret Aspinall who, as chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, fought so hard to get belated justice for the ninety-six Liverpool supporters who died in the needless tragedy that was to change the face of English football for ever – and were then blamed by some for bringing about the disaster themselves. One of the victims that fateful day in 1989 was her son James, who was just eighteen. ‘There are ninety-six reasons why it should not be allowed,’ she says. ‘Standing should never, ever come back. I don’t think there is anything safe about standing.’

I believe the Hillsborough Family Support Group fought an inspirational campaign to ensure the truth finally came to light. But I’m not sure she’s right about this. Neither is Mark, who was in the Leppings Lane Stand that appalling day: ‘I knew that the centre pen was dangerous as I’d been in there on three previous occasions (including the semi-final the year before). I was keen to avoid going in there again, so I went to the right of the goal where there was plenty of room.’

Should everyone be required to sit down at a football match all these years on?

It is fair to say Mark is not an armchair fan. Not only does he still rock up at Anfield regularly, he has been to more than 100 other League grounds in England as well. ‘I’m not sure I’d want to stand up regularly, but I still stand at lower division grounds occasionally,’ he says.

So why not every time? ‘My plates are playing me up at the moment,’ says Mark. Good to know that, given long enough, you can teach a Mickey Mouser to talk proper.

If there is to be some radical new thinking at the Olympic Stadium, I’d also like to see a section where fans of both teams can sit together – as happens at Fulham.

Generally, of course, there is strict segregation inside a football stadium. Home supporters sit here, the away lot sit there. And never the twain shall meet (unless it’s a bunch of Millwall yobbos who’ve used a League Cup tie as an excuse to hole up in the Queens with a view to starting World War Three, in which case you, them and a whole bunch of policemen meet in Green Street).

However, it’s my guess a lot of us have smuggled an opposition fan into Upton Park at one time or another.

Your mate wants to see the game, but the away end is sold out – so you do the decent thing and invite them to join you in the Bobby Moore Upper instead. You start to regret it the minute the tickets arrive – if this mate of yours doesn’t keep his trap shut you are both going to be in for a very uncomfortable afternoon. You are still warning him in hushed tones of the dangers as you surreptitiously check that no one else in the packed bar is listening to your conversation. He’s nodding furiously to indicate he fully understands his side of the bargain, but you still feel uneasy. Then a bloke jogs your elbow causing you to spill half your beer and you really begin to wish you’d stayed in bed.

As it happens you both get away with it … this time. But wouldn’t it have been so much better if there had been an area set aside where fans of both clubs could go in together and enjoy a laugh with their mates, safe in the knowledge they would emerge at the end of the game with their lives intact? We’ve got a family section, why not a mixed section? You’d need a few safeguards, naturally. But it would be perfectly possible if there were the demand for it.

Any takers? Or will it just be yours truly, surrounded by Tottenham-supporting friends politely asking me to remind them of one or two of the finer points of the game, like why the fella standing in front of the goal is wearing a different coloured shirt to the rest of the team?

Where were we? Ah yes, the Sir Trevor Brooking Stand, where – despite it being called a stand – you’re supposed to sit down. In all, there are the best part of 6,000 seats – some of which are given over to visiting fans, who generally refuse to use them. The big clubs get the majority of the lower tier, but most just get the left section. West Ham supporters who like to enjoy a little good-natured banter with our visitors take up the right half when they can. Unsurprisingly, there is invariably a generous filling of police and stewards in the middle of this particular sandwich. Above them is the family section, and you can only get a ticket for that if you have a child in tow. (It was in the family section that my son first abused a referee. I nearly died of shame. He called the ref a nincompoop! Of all the insults he could have come up with, he had to use nincompoop. People have been ejected from the ground for using words with that many syllables. I’m pleased to say, he uses much shorter ones these days when analysing a referee’s performance.)

The seats in the Trevor Brooking Stand – which, until 2009, had spent the previous fourteen years answering to the name of the Centenary Stand – are part of an overall capacity of just 35,016, which, you will recall, is why we’re having to pack our bags and leave. I was on the North Bank to see us draw 2–2 with Spurs when there were 42,322 in the ground, which is the official record attendance at Upton Park (it’s likely this figure was exceeded in the ’30s but no one knows for sure because many of the club’s records were destroyed when the ground was bombed during the Second World War).

In the 1970 game against Spurs, they had the likes of Pat Jennings, Martin Chivers and ‘nice one’ Cyril Knowles; we had Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and the real Frank Lampard. The two teams were evenly matched and both knew how to pass the ball.

Games between West Ham and Spurs regularly attracted crowds approaching 40,000 back then, but this one was given added spice by the fact it marked Martin Peters’ return to Upton Park after a controversial swap deal had taken him to White Hart Lane in exchange for £50,000 and a rather rotund Jimmy Greaves. It finished 2–2, with neither Peters nor Greaves on the scoresheet. Their goals came from Mike England (who wasn’t English) and Alan Mullery (who was the first man to be sent off playing for England). Ours were scored by Peter ‘useless’ Eustace and the not-so-useless Hurst.

The significant thing about Hurst’s goal that day was that it made him the second-highest scorer in our history. In all, he went on to score 248 goals in 499 first-team games for West Ham – still some way behind the phenomenal record of Vic Watson, who scored 326 times for the club over fifteen years in the ’20s and ’30s – but nevertheless a tally that is unlikely to be surpassed in my lifetime, and probably anybody else’s. Although I don’t recall that being the first thing to go through my head as I punched the air in celebration, showed two fingers to the Tottenham fans (indicating it was the second time we had equalised, you understand) and took several involuntary steps down the terracing as the shoving from the back rippled down.

To your left is the East Stand. You’re right: it does seem totally out of place now, dwarfed by the rest of the stadium and looking rather sorry for itself. But it was quite the thing in its day. This was built in 1969, when England were world champions; Harold Wilson was Prime Minister; the Beatles dominated the charts; Moore, Hurst and Peters were still playing in claret and blue – and I was on the North Bank because I didn’t know about the shortcut that made it possible to get to the East Stand from Upton Park station without having to trudge all the way down Green Street, turn left at the Boleyn pub and then take the Barking Road far enough east to gain access to the fab new stand from Priory Road.

The trick is to nip off down Tudor Road, which takes you to a footpath that snakes through a gap between the ground and the local bus station. My mate Tony, who wore two-tone tonic suits, showed it to me – and I have been grateful to him ever since.

The East Stand may now be the oldest and smallest in the stadium, but once it was the loudest. And the funniest. What made it different was the terraced lower tier that was to become, in West Ham folklore at least, a legend in its own right: the Chicken Run. (In the interests of accuracy, I should probably point out that the original Chicken Run was an old wooden construction surrounded by fine-mesh wire, knocked down to make way for the new East Stand – which in turn awaits its own appointment with the bulldozer. But a name that good shouldn’t be allowed to die when we move to the Olympic Stadium. Let’s find room for Chicken Run III.)

I didn’t discover this unique part of the ground until the early ’70s but, when I did, it was love at first slight. No one was spared the insults that came flying out of there like machine gun bullets – opposition players, officials, even our own players. Actually, it was especially our players – particularly the ones who were judged to be failing to put in the required effort. It wasn’t just the barbs themselves that lifted this abuse into an art form; it was the timing with which they were delivered. If taking the piss had been an Olympic event rather than part of the mandatory drugs test, these boys would have won every gold medal going.

The only time you didn’t want to find yourself in the Chicken Run was on one of those rare occasions that saw the sun shine on E13. In fact, it’s a problem to this very day in the lower part of the East Stand. Unless you have the foresight to go armed with a peaked cap, you have to spend most of the game shielding your eyes with your hand when it’s sunny. From the other side of the ground it looks like a parade ground saluting its commanding officer, which is quite amusing for them, but becomes a bit annoying if you have to do it for an entire game.

Still, that’s a small price to pay for all the fantastic humour that came out of there over the years. Funnily enough, a lot of that seemed to go when they ripped out the terrace and put in seats. Did I ever tell you about the campaign for safe standing, by the way? Oh. Seems I did.

If the Boleyn Ground was to have been saved, it would have been done by redeveloping the East Stand, which can only hold 5,000 people. As recently as 2005 this was still very much on the cards, to the extent that planning permission was being sought. The idea then was to use the extra space that became available when the old West Stand went west – both literally and metaphorically. That happened in 2001. It was replaced by a new construction, which was repositioned several yards further back to allow more elbowroom for the playing surface. (I much preferred things when fans were closer to the pitch down both sides, but I can understand why opposition players and shortsighted linesmen didn’t.)

But I know that isn’t going to happen. No one is going to save Upton Park, not now it has been sold to property developers Galliard. Still, if rubbing shoulders with cockneys all these years has taught me anything it’s that there’s no mileage in feeling sorry for yourself, so let’s get on with this tour before someone realises we shouldn’t be here and chucks us out.

Opposite you is the imposing Bobby Moore Stand. You will notice that there are two tiers and the 9,000 seats are painted in such a way that they spell out the name of our magnificent club. As far as I know, the contractors who were given the job stuck to the terms of their contract. (Unlike the artist who was charged with painting a giant seagull in the main stand when Brighton moved into their new Amex Community Stadium. He added a little scatological flourish on one of the seats below, which was later painted out because it was considered to be in bad taste.)

It used to be the poor relation in its days as the South Bank, which is perhaps why the away fans were housed there. Back in the heyday of hooliganism, that’s where West Ham’s serious psychos went in search of aggro. Not that they needed much encouragement, but they got it from time to time from other parts of the ground with the scarily sinister chant of ‘South Bank, South Bank, do your job’. There is a story that the Boleyn Ground is haunted by one of Anne’s maids. But when I go in the stand that now graces the southern end of the ground and is named after the most famous figure in our club’s history, the ghosts I see wear braces, bovver boots and Ben Sherman shirts. To be honest, they are about the only thing I won’t be sorry to leave behind.

To your right is the main stand, which can accommodate up to 15,000 Happy Hammers. It also accommodates a whole bunch of happy hangers-on, who are regularly invited by their business chums to watch a game from one of the executive boxes that separate the two tiers. Have you ever watched football from behind glass? It’s like having sex with your trousers done up.

This is the stand you saw on the way in – the one with the iffy plastic castles attached to the outside walls. It has been suffering something of an identity crisis in recent years thanks to the wonders of corporate sponsorship. When it was rebuilt it was named the Dr Martens Stand, which must have pleased all those former skinheads who had stomped around in DMs back in the ’60s and ’70s. That deal ran out in 2009, and for a couple of years it resumed its former unimaginative but geographically accurate title. The West Stand was not to be left in peace, however, and was renamed once more when currency broker Alpari became the club’s sponsors. Then they went belly up. We haven’t had a lot of luck with sponsorship deals in recent years – this was the second one to end in tears following a debacle involving the XL airline in 2008. As Lady Bracknell would have undoubtedly observed had she been a West Ham season ticket-holder: ‘To lose one sponsor may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’

Anyway, there you have the Boleyn Ground. You’ll excuse me if I don’t show you the changing rooms and the directors’ box and the trophy cabinet (not that that would take very long) – if you want to see that sort of stuff you’ll have to take the official stadium tour. No doubt they’ll also throw in a few facts I’ve left out, like West Ham’s first game here ended in a 3–0 victory over The Hated Millwall in front of 10,000-odd spectators (the spectators weren’t odd, the number is; well, 10,000 is even actually, but I’m sure you get my drift). They might even point to the part of the pitch in the south-west corner that was hit by a Nazi flying bomb in August 1944, forcing us to play all our games away from home until December (apparently we won nine on the bounce, before returning to Upton Park and promptly losing to Tottenham – which is the kind of thing West Ham does).

But I haven’t invited you here to listen to a load of facts and figures. I just wanted to show you the place that has meant so much to me and countless others before we have to leave it. To be honest, I should have brought you when there was a game being played – that way you could have really understood the unmistakable feel of this unique part of the world for yourself.

Honestly, there’s no place on earth like the Boleyn Ground. If you don’t believe me, you really ought to try it for yourself before it goes the same way as poor old Anne.