West Ham stadium: Sadness at the Boleyn Ground as East End era draws to a close

The first thing that greets the East End diaspora when it returns each week and rolls out of the gates of Upton Park station and on to Green Street is a wall of saris and salwar kameezes in the window of the Kashish Boutique.

The crowd, in its thousands, turns right past the Worldwide Money Transfer place, Papa's Fried Chicken, Humza's Halal Butchers and an Afro-Caribbean wigmaker. Then it's onward past Kebabish, another halal butcher's, Ceejay's Afro-Caribbean Hair and Beauty Salon and the entrance to the Queen's Market, where Muhammad Shahid Nazir from the Punjab briefly found fame as the One Pound Fish Man.

West Ham United Football Club is known throughout the land and soon the world, if its owners have their way, as the home of London's cockney faithful. But the Boleyn Ground splits the Newham Council wards of Green Street East and Green Street West, the two wards with the smallest White British population in all the country. According to the 2011 census, just 4.8 per cent.

It's appropriate enough. West Ham's fans, for the most part, are the children and the grandchildren of aspirational East Enders who, a little bit brutalised by the Second World War, headed east to the suburbs in the hope of a better life, maybe even with a garden.

In their place now are the children and grandchildren of men and women who had hopes and dreams of their own, which brought them to Upton Park from Bengali villages, from the Caribbean and the coast of West Africa.

Finally, before the masses reach the claret gates of the Boleyn Ground, where the club have played continuously since 1904, they pass Ken's Cafe.

Today, its owners Carole and Ken Lucas will roll up the shutters at around 7am, as they have been doing for 49 years. And as morning turns to afternoon, one plate of egg and bacon and bubble and squeak at a time, they will watch the clock roll back to a day even before their own arrival.

"Once the football goes, there will be nothing for people to come back for," says Carole, who is 75, has worked far too hard for far too long, and is as disarmingly charming as you'd imagine. There will, eventually, be flats, 838 of them. "This is not the area for posh flats. This is Upton Park. This is an area of deprived families, of diversity and unemployment. My little grandson was walking down the street the other day and said to me, 'Everyone's speaking different languages.' It's wonderful."

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The ties that bind the now dispersed cockneys to their cherished roots are frayed indeed. East London is better known for cafes that serve only cereal, or nine quid coffee, or cater for cat lovers than it is for such novelties as pie and mash or jellied eels.

So what? Time moves on. But as the tremors of seismic social change rippled all around it the Boleyn has stood upon the East End like King Canute. Carole, Ken and everyone else knows that when West Ham United ups and moves to the Olympic Park at the end of this season, the tides will come. A vital, living thing will subside into history.

"They've killed the area for the shopkeepers," says Carole. "All the pubs, the cafes, the little off-licences, the majority of them are totally reliant on football." Carole and Ken are lucky, they own their business. "Anyone with rent to pay is done for."

At the corner of Green Street and Barking Road stands the famous statue, of Bobby Moore on the shoulders of Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, the Jules Rimet trophy in his hand, framed appropriately enough by the Boleyn Tavern and yet another halal butchers.

This is where the crowds gather on match day to drink cheap lager and join the vast queues at Nathan's Pie and Eel Shop, waiting for a scoop of mash and a meat pie with a crust as flat and dry as the Serengeti, at least until the liquor, flavoured with parsley and made from the stewing water left over from the eels is poured unsparingly on top of it.

"It ain't all that," admits Tim Long, 32 who has been coming in from Chelmsford in Essex with his dad "at least six times a season" for 25 years. "But we always come here. I've still never had the eels."

Richard Nathan has admitted that when West Ham go, he too is likely to go to Essex. And like his neighbours, is unhappy that Newham Council, which has made a £40m contribution towards the redevelopment of the Olympic Stadium, has not done more to help the likes of him.

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From next year, it will be the bars and restaurants of Westfield shopping centre that line the route to the ground on match day, and West Ham's fans will fall upon the chrome taps and craft beers of sanitised chain bars like The Cow and The Tap Room. In the place of pie and mash and the greasy spoon will be Wahaca and Jamie's Italian.

"These fans, the ones that come in here, they've already paid 60-quid-odd for their ticket. They want to eat in a little cafe, somewhere cheap," says Carole. "I've known fans who've come in here with their grandkids, and now I see those grandkids bringing their grandkids. I get a lot of kisses on the cheek. They won't find anything like this in Stratford."

West Ham regularly claim that surveys show that 90 per cent of fans are in favour of the move, even if, says Carole, "I've got five season-ticket holders in my family and none of them were asked."

But there is, without question, amid all the bittersweetness, hope and excitement about the future. Derek Emery, who is 73, grew up in Walthamstow, moved to Upminster "a few decades ago" and has been making the pilgrimage back to Upton Park with his grown-up son Joe, now 33, since the moment he was old enough.

"It will be very odd to say goodbye, but you've got to move on," he says. "The East End has changed so much. Even pubs that were packed with West Ham fans, like the Earl of Wakefield, have already closed down."

“Like any football fan, the past is an eclectic place. I've got good and bad memories, you always do with West Ham," he admits. "Di Canio was always good fun."

So many are the eras and the players he has seen come and go that the names of some of the more recent ones do on occasion semi-escape him. Son Joe, who also lives in Upminster, recalls dad's joy at a "Bobby Zamanosa" lob at the Emirates, how "Yossinov Benidorm" was a disappointment, and that late FA Cup semi-final winner from "Marleen Hartswood".

Both father and son went to three different events at London 2012, where "the atmosphere was fantastic". and admit: "If we want to be a big club, we've got to move on. There's no other way."

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Terry Salmon, 67, was born in Romford to parents from Stepney Green. He had his first season ticket in the 1960s and now travels from Norfolk for every home match to meet his three old schoolmates in the Black Lion, Plaistow, then walk to the match. This is the pub that Bobby Moore, Harry Redknapp and the rest would visit after matches. Those were the days.

"It is an emotional experience, and it will be an emotional farewell. Of course, I'm conscious every time I walk to the stadium of what the East End is and was. I wouldn't stop coming because of a change of ground, but in a stadium of that vast size, with 54,000 in - if they manage to get 54,000 in - the atmosphere won't be the same as it is at the Boleyn, though they keep telling us it will be."

Terry and his friends have all been to their appointment at the West Ham centre at Westfield to choose their new seats. "That's the one thing: when we went we searched high and low for where we would have a drink. None of us found anywhere.

"It's a risk, isn't it? If we get relegated, the gates will go down to 25,000 to 30,000, the club could even lose the core of its support. The ground has a lot to do with the atmosphere of the club, and unless it does build up into something really special, it is a risk."

The Black Lion, like the Denmark Arms, and the Queen's on Green Street all admit life post-football will be a battle to stay alive. The Boleyn Tavern has pre-empted matters by opening a youth hostel.

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That West Ham's move should transfer the income of places like these into the pockets of the likes of Westfield is as vivid an example of the corporatised march of football as you are ever likely to see. Then there are the owners, David Gold and David Sullivan, who make much of the fact that this is their club, their town. David Gold's mother lived on Green Street itself. But they are businessmen not philanthropists, and you would have to speak to 10,000 West Ham fans or more before you find one who believes that, faced with a choice, they would put the club's interests ahead of their own. The Olympic Stadium may or may not make West Ham great. It will almost certainly make these men a lot of money.

Football, it is so often said, is the working man's game, even if that term is not quite so easy to define as in the days at the turn of the 19th century when West Ham was the team of the Thames Valley Ironworks. But the economics of football change as rapidly as the economics of cities. On what grounds would Karl Marx differentiate between a greasy spoon and a cereal cafe?

And the multimillionaire players, whose astronomical wages still tend to come out of the pockets of people paying far more than they can afford to watch the game, have half the time escaped from the type of African or South American poverty not seen in the East End in a hundred years.

Green Street will survive, and move on. It has already moved on. The carpet and furniture shops, the butchers, the hair salons and the fruit and veg sellers will even be glad to see West Ham go. The new flats will come and with them, no doubt, the inevitable tsunami of gentrification. Someone, probably with a beard and too tight trousers, might even decide jellied eels are the next big thing.

But what will be lost is the last great living link between the East End and its scattered sons and daughters, and that cannot be replaced.