Upton Park has been gone for 10 years – so why I do feel compelled to go back? | OneFootball

It’s the last Saturday in January and my stomach tightens as the District Line train rolls eastwards.

The next stop is Upton Park. I feel a mix of apprehension and nervous excitement, like meeting an old flame.

I haven’t been back here since the last game in May 2016 and I’m not returning out of curiosity to see a new-build London housing estate.

It’s not really a brave decision; some First World War soldiers went back to the trenches years later, daring to confront the grip those charred battlefields held over them.

But it’s not an easy choice either. Ten years is a long time to move on, but West Ham’s migration to Stratford is notorious for ripping the soul from the club.

Ghosts haven’t been allowed to rest, especially as the much-vaunted ‘world-class team for a world-class stadium’ has never materialised.

More than anything else, I have the sense I needed to come back here. It’s probably the first place outside of my childhood home where I felt I belonged. And I wanted to explore why Upton Park still holds a place in my imagination in 2026.

Author Thomas Wolfe once wrote: ‘You can never go home again’, as returning to one’s past is impossible due to inevitable changes in people and places. But I’m willing to try.

Dixy’s Chicken & horsesh*t

Growing up in Bristol, a trip to Upton Park was a twice-a-season treat until me and my dad became season ticket holders in 2012.

For three years between sixth form and university, I stayed at home and worked at Aldi. Most of my mates had left, nights out were rare and my dating life was as barren as Modibo Maiga’s scoring record.

I wouldn’t describe myself as lost, more that my life hadn’t quite begun without being sure what I wanted.

Matches at Upton Park were a life raft. Gary Neville once said how he’d contextualise pre-match jitters by saying that, no matter what happened, he’d be having a Chinese in two hours’ time.

As a painfully shy teenager, working on the Aldi checkouts could be an ordeal. My face would turn a shade of red unseen outside of a Dulux chart, with no hiding place and no shortage of customers ready to point it out.

The best way to ease the discomfort was by reminding myself that I’d be going to West Ham on Saturday, my metaphorical Chinese.

It was in those final years that we developed a pre-match routine; drive to Acton Town or catch the train to Paddington, ride the Tube across London, buy a programme at Upton Park station and turn left for a stomach-lining Dixy’s Chicken (Fillet Burger, Fries and a small tub that mixed ketchup and mayo).

Then source the latest Over Land and Sea fanzine, nip down Tudor Road to avoid the Green Street scrum, pass between the East Stand with its Atkins Diet turnstiles and Priory Park, before entering the Bobby Moore Lower.

The smells outside were a semi-cliched mix of fried onions, stale beer and horses*t.

The atmosphere inside could be unforgiving; After 10 minutes of one match, which West Ham were winning 1-0, one fan behind me had seen enough. ‘Get your f*cking arses in gear,” he cried, showering the back of my neck with spittle.

There were several flat defeats and an Allardyce-era goalless draw with Sunderland that is still being played in a parallel universe.

But I’ll take the best moments to the grave: Mohamed Diame vs. Chelsea, Morgan Amalfitano’s clincher against Liverpool, beating title-chasing Tottenham in 2016, Andy Carroll’s hat-trick in a visceral 3-3 draw with Arsenal and the last ever rendition of Bubbles.

Ultimately, the result didn’t matter too much. Every visit remains a treasured memory.

West Ham fans before the Boleyn Ground’s final match, May 2016.

Self-contained pilgrimage

As the platform clears, I notice the signs pointing to ‘West Ham United Football Club’ are still visible below their replacements.

Either the TFL are using tracing paper or there’s an uneasy embrace between the past and the present, one that’s replicated around the area.

Stepping onto Green Street again is a bittersweet rush. No need for Google Maps as I wander around Queen’s Market, while the rows of terraced houses are exactly as I remember.

But I’m just delaying the moment of heartbreak, unwilling to set eyes on the irreversible truth. This is now Upton Gardens, 842 flats across 15 brown and grey buildings.

Each is named after a historical West Ham figure, but the more revealing discovery is the ‘No Ball Games’ sign where the pitch once lay. It’s a little too on the nose, if anything.

The No Ball Games sign where the old Boleyn Ground pitch lay.

There are other signs of time’s remorseless march. My old turnstile is now a power generator, the Hammers Social Club has become a fitness club and ‘West Ham’s Favourite Burger Bar’ is now an outlet that sells smash patties, the trend du jour of 2020s takeaway food.

Nothing prepares you for the silence; moving because it allows you time to reflect, unsettling when you know what this place once was.

It’s an eerie experience and an entirely self-contained one; suddenly I’m aware of being the only West Ham fan here on a personal pilgrimage.

Apart from a few old West Ham badges on shopfronts and some murals (the Bonds and Brooking one is wonderful), it feels like the area has moved on.

It’s equally hard to imagine there was ever a football ground here – imagine the planning meeting if one were proposed in such a residential area now.

Nobody else in the vicinity is consumed by nostalgia. But no society has ever been as consumed by nostalgia as ours.

In a 2025 interview, documentary maker Adam Curtis said: “We live in a world where so much of the past is played back to us all the time.

“The whole of the internet is constantly taking stuff from the past and playing it back in all kinds of different ways to us, all the time.”

Curtis used the example of watching clips from old comedy shows, noting how much of the audience responsible for the canned laughter must now be dead – “It’s like a haunting.”

I thought of this while walking back up Green Street. The internet means you can watch old highlights on demand, retreating into a virtual world where Upton Park still stands.

Memories get tangled with these endless fragments over time. Ridiculous as it sounds, there was a tiny part of me that believed the old ground was still there, because it lived on in my head and on my screens.

Or, as Curtis said, while “the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away.”

I’d been guilty of daydreaming, returning here mentally for years to seek comfort whenever I’ve been dissatisfied.

But Wolfe was right; you can never go home again. I thought of little else for a week afterwards.

Unhappiest of arranged marriages

Hypernormalisation was a phrase coined by Alexei Yurchak to describe the late days of the Soviet Union.

Yurchak noted how everybody knew that Soviet society was dying, but nobody had a convincing vision of an alternative. Therefore, both politicians and citizens felt resigned to carrying on the pretence of business as usual.

West Ham are a hypernormalised club. For all the boardroom bluster and manipulated attendance figures, everybody knows the stadium move hasn’t gone to plan.

Like most season-ticket holders, I’ve tried to embrace the London Stadium. There have been stand-out moments – Sevilla was unforgettable – but it’s largely been bleak.

In good times, the matchday experience is tolerated. Otherwise, it’s a reminder of how West Ham left their home for a venue that still doesn’t quite feel like ours.

Nobody knows what the future looks like. There is talk of tinkering around the edges of the London Stadium by well-meaning pragmatists, akin to plastering a bullet wound.

Others look to the continent and how Juventus demolished the unloved Stadio delle Alpi for a smaller, purpose-built football ground, while venues in Stuttgart, Seville and Buenos Aires have all removed running tracks in recent years.

But West Ham do not own the London Stadium and are unable to make anything more than cosmetic changes.

Fan dissent has been ever-present since 2016, rarely far from the surface. It’s the definition of an unhappy arranged marriage.

I believe the future must lie away from the current set-up, whether the stadium is remodelled without a running track or new owners build a fresh ground elsewhere. Any vision of a better future without this is impossible.

As Curtis said: “Maybe one of the ways to move into the future is to do the most radical thing you could think of doing at this present moment, which is: forget the past, move on.”

This can happen – but only when West Ham have somewhere to call home. Only then can Upton Park finally be laid to rest.