Lifelong Hammers fan Jack Fawbert looks back at some special moments at the Boleyn Ground...
Until the age of 12 I wasn't very interested in football. Then, in 1962, a mate from school took me to see West Ham beat Everton 4-0 at the Boleyn Ground.
I immediately fell in love with everything about the experience; the roar of the crowd, the chicken run swaying to 'Bubbles' and the commitment of all those men in flat caps.
I saw every game of the 1964 cup run, including the final. I saw every home game of the European Cup Winners' Cup run as well as the Final at Wembley.
Our coach from Barking broke down on the way and we just got inside the stadium as they kicked off.
Much has changed since those halcyon days; the flat caps are gone, as have the old chicken run and the standing terraces in the, then uncovered, North Bank.
But, many things have stayed more or less the same; the closeness of the pitch to the terraces where, in Trevor Brooking's words 'you can smell the grass', the singing of 'Bubbles', the passion of the fans and, of course, those famous claret and blue shirts.
Whilst the claim that 'football is always better in the past' is questionable, not least because of a seeming collective amnesia about the bad times, there is no doubt that such 'tradition' and 'heritage' are very important to West Ham fans like me as well as to the new generations of fans who have bought into the 'West Ham family'.
Whilst nostalgic reminiscences of 'the good old days' of Greenwood, Lyall, Moore, Hurst and Peters also need to be tempered with the realities of a more globalised, commercialized and corporate enterprise today, the years of commitment to an ideal held by many thousands of people like me has to be memorialised into the very structures and ethos of the new Stadium as we venture into a brave new world post-Boleyn Ground.